Saint Francis of Assisi proposed a general law be passed, “that everyone who is able should scatter grain and seed on the streets, so that … there should be plenty for the birds, especially our sister larks”. In the UK, we do this without needing to be told. Two-thirds of us contribute to the £250m-worth of bird food scattered every year: enough to feed the intended recipients three times over. We love birds to excess, and there is something ancient in the entanglement. The archaeological record suggests that we have been feeding the birds ever since the first caveperson butchered a woolly mammoth and left its guts for the ravens.
It 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”.
Birds – as Nicolson discovers – are not necessarily the most willing teachers. For one thing, they freak out when we look at them. Our forward-facing eyes make them think we want to eat them. Nicolson solves this by hiding himself. In a wild corner of his Sussex farm, Perch Hill, he commissions a man-sized birdhouse: an octagonal hide on wooden stilts, covered in nesting boxes and spy holes. It’s big enough to sleep in, with a bed, a desk, a wood burner and fold-down windows on all sides. He calls this construction his “absorbatory, a place to take it in, to dissolve, if such a thing is possible, the boundary between self and world” – or, he admits, what others might term a “shed”.
Typically, when men move into the garden shed, it suggests that all is not well at home. But Nicolson – who is married to the gardener and writer Sarah Raven – keeps his personal life out of the classroom. After the publication of so many nature books that shoehorn in ill-fitting narratives of personal crisis and growth, this makes a refreshing change. Wrens, robins, buzzards, blackbirds and tits come to bird school to teach lessons about themselves alone: how they breed, fly, navigate, why they sing.
Nicolson is a good student – a fine observer of the natural world – and for a while, he lives a bird lover’s dream. A wren skitters across his desk; tits nest in the walls; ravens tumble in play flight overhead. He piles up carrion for the meat-eating birds and attempts to entice nightingales with welcome mats of blackthorn. But there are missing voices in the choir of the wood. Those nightingales never show up, and the scant few migrants who eventually appear in late spring are like “elegists for a previous world, singing their anthems for the lost”.
Nature today, Nicolson points out, is “residual, what is left over after what we have done to it. The large and overarching story of English birds in the last century is mournful.” Migrating birds are caught and shot by the million long before they reach our shores. Bird-friendly habitat is eaten up by intensive farming. Even our bird-feeding habits can be harmful, spreading disease and skewing the evolutionary odds against the more timid species. Britain, it seems, is a nation of bird lovers who don’t know how to love. Bird School is not a bad place to start learning.
• Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
