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A Beginner in the Wood
by Adam Nicolson
Book Reviewed by:An intimate exploration of the lives of birds and their interactions with man, by a preeminent naturalist.
Poets and scientists, saints and naturalists, stalk through these pages. Neighboring cock robins duel almost to the death. Tawny owl widows are seen looking for tawny owl widowers to set up shop with. Blackbirds are found singing phrases from late Beethoven quartets, both in a garden in southern England (where they have been listening to records played through the open window of a drawing room) and in Bonn, where Beethoven himself first heard them and where they are still singing to the same rhythms two hundred fifty years later.
Bird School describes and follows Adam Nicolson's progress over two or three years in trying to learn about, and eventually to create an environment friendly to, the birds of the farm where he lives in Sussex. In simple language that evinces his careful observational prowess, Nicolson aims to cross the boundary between the scientific and the prescientific understanding of birds, looking into why and how they sing, how they fly and breed, how they survive and migrate, how they have suffered at our hands, how we have loved them and damaged them, and how we might create, or re-create, a refuge for them. Here is a set of lessons for someone who knows little but cares a lot about the living world that is in such dire crisis. Here is life in the "rough grounds," on the edge of culture and nature.
1. Bird School: LEARNING
The first time I met a bird close-up, it was dead. A raven. Even seeing it on the side of the mountain road in Crete was a shock: a large, dark splayed body the size of a small dog. I stopped the car and got out, not quite certain if I would find a wounded animal, enraged at its fate and frenzied in pain. But it was properly dead. Whatever it had once been had left. Holding its rigid form – all looseness and flexibility gone; it was as stiff as a dried cod – feeling my way around it, rustling open its wing feathers, pushing through the soft plumage on its nape and back, was like exploring a derelict house. Rafters, furnishings, upholstery, timbers, abandonment. It had been shot and its bill was bloodied in gouts towards the point, yet the midnight blue of its back and wing shimmered in my hands, each sheathing layer overlapping the next in soft-edged scales.
The bird felt like a miracle of construction: the splitting-axe of its bill, more palaeo than ...
More literary digressions are sprinkled throughout, but there's plenty of science, too. Nicolson explains how light pollution impacts birds' circadian rhythms and the timing of their songs; and he explores birds' evolutionary history and the harsh realities of breeding, nesting, and raising chicks... In a chapter on the extraordinary feat of migration, Nicolson includes species-specific mileages and maps, and he describes birds' sensing of Earth's magnetic field for guidance—another capability we can marvel at but never achieve...continued
Full Review
(839 words)
(Reviewed by Rose Rankin).
From his perch among the trees, Adam Nicolson observed the birds of the Sussex woods for over a year, cataloguing his findings in Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood. By the spring migration, however, he noticed that numerous species that should have arrived—that for centuries had arrived at that time—were notably absent: warblers, turtle doves, nightingales, and more. It was a potent example of the global problem of bird extinctions and crashing populations.
In North America, the first-ever large-scale study of bird population changes found a decline of nearly three billion birds since 1970, a figure deemed "staggering" by the scientists involved. And it's not just rare birds like whooping cranes or those that were ...
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