Bird School by Adam Nicolson review – close encounters of a feathery kind
This account of living among birds in a comfortable garden hide is fascinating but also melancholy as the author witnesses how few remainIt is apposite, then, that writer Adam Nicolson’s love affair with birds began with a raven – a dead one – that he picked up from the side of a road. “Holding its rigid form,” he writes in Bird School, “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 … that moment of closeness to such an animal was the beginning of something for me.”Until that moment, Nicolson claims to have been relatively indifferent to birds. Brought up to love the landscape rather than the creatures in it, “the birds in the wood or the garden at home remained a blank, a flicker of nothing much, like motes in sunlight”. He decided the time had come “to look and listen, to return to Bird School and see what it might teach me”. Continue reading...
