Jackie Morris & Robert Macfarlane THE BOOK OF BIRDS

The Book of Birds

From the creators of the internationally bestselling, award-winning, multi-adapted phenomenon The Lost Words: a dazzling celebration of birdlife in Britain, re-imagining the classic field guide for a new generation of nature lovers
A great thinning of the skies is underway. Around 50% of bird species are in decline worldwide. Our dawns and springs are quieter each year than the last. An almost unimaginable abundance has been lost. It does not have to be this way -- but we will not save what we do not love.

The Book of Birds is a compendium of forty-nine bird species, from Avocet to Yellowhammer, all of which are presently declining or endangered in Britain. Inspired by the classic bird-books with which the authors grew up, this is a field guide with a difference. It asks not 'What is that bird?', but 'Who is that bird?' It shows its readers how to identify birds, but also how to identify with them.

With lyrical precision and playfulness, Robert Macfarlane evokes each bird's habits and habitats -- their patterns of flight and of song, how they hunt and gather, how they nest and raise their young, the stories and myths which attend them, the threats which shadow them, and how their wild lives intersect with our own. And on every page we encounter Jackie Morris's exhilarating artwork, painted in watercolour and gold and animated by an extraordinary attention to detail and sense of life. Set among this dazzling flock of species are seven sections celebrating the 'Seven Wonders' that together make up the everyday miracle of 'Bird': Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight and Migration.
Seven years in the making, The Book of Birds is a love letter to the splendours and mysteries of birdlife, and a clarion call to halt the loss of birds from land, sea and sky. From Dipper to Dunnock and Kestrel to Kingfisher, from mountain to ocean and city to river, Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane conjure the unique spirit and lifeway of each species. This is a book to be treasured by bird-lovers of all ages, and a future classic work of reference.

Jackie Morris

Jackie Morris is a british artist and grew up in the Vale of Evesham. She studied at Hereford College of Arts and at Bath Academy and currently lives in a cottage on the cliffs of Pembrokeshire. Jackie has illustrated for the New Statesman, Independent and Guardian. She has collaborated with Ted Hughes, and has written & illustrated over forty books, including beloved classics such as The Snow Leopard, The Ice Bear, Song of the Golden Hare, Tell Me a Dragon, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, The Wild Swans and The Unwinding.

In 2017 the internationally acclaimed The Lost Words, a collaboration with Robert Macfarlane, was released and followed up with The Lost Spells in 2020. Jackie Morris has appeared, painting live on a big screen, at Spell Song Concerts at numerous venues including The Royal Festival Hall, The Royal Albert Hall, and the International Hay Festival and in 2021 from The Natural History Museum. Jackie Morris was awarded The Hay Medal for Illustration 2018 and the CLIK Kate Greenaway Medal 2019 for The Lost Words.

Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of English in Cambridge. He is well-known as a writer about nature, climate, landscape, people and place, and his books –– which include Underland (2019), a book-length prose-poem Ness (2018), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012) and Mountains of the Mind (2003) –– have been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for music, film, television, radio and theatre.

He has also written operas, plays, and films including River (2022) and Mountain (2017), both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020). As a lyricist, he has written songs and albums with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023) and an EP, Six Signs (2022). In 2022, with the actor-director Simon McBurney he co-adapted Susan Cooper's classic fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising into a twelve-part BBC audio drama series.

He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College and of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2017 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was awarded the inaugural Weston International Award for career achievement in non-fiction. His latest book is entitled Is a River Alive? and concerns the lives and deaths of rivers and the global Rights of Nature movement.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Blackwell's, Broad Street Oxford