THE BOOK OF BIRDS

Celebrating birds we might lose.

Following their collaborations The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020), British nature writer Macfarlane and illustrator Morris turn their gaze to threatened British birds. Though the book declares itself to be a field guide, readers will not find a handy and weatherproof tome in these pages. The book instead turns the idea of a field guide on its head: “Instead of photographs—paint. Alongside data—metaphor, story, poetry. In place of definition—relation. As well as classification—something like love.” Compiled over six years and structured according to the authors’ “seven wonders” of the bird (Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight and Migration), each of the 49 species included is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species and receives a few pages of poetic text alongside soft and precise watercolor renderings, including one that spans two pages for each bird. Macfarlane’s text is most akin to prose poetry, ranging from childlike rhyme (“Rook, Rook, everyday crook, hawker of goods, cooker of books”) to detailed, sumptuous description: “Fragile Avocet seen at sunset in silhouette seems blown from glass—as if a breath of wind would leave her in shards amid the sea reeds, the fescue, the eelgrass.” This poetry, coupled with each species’ “slow slide towards the absolute dark of extinction” hanging over these pages, lends the book the effect of an evocation or a prayer over the memory of birds that risk being forgotten. But there is a glimmer of hope to the project: “Knowledge may lead to wonder, wonder to care, care to action, action to change. But this is a fragile chain, easily broken—its links must be reforged and rejoined, over and over again.”

Not the most practical bird guide, but an important one.