Sue Brooks eagerly enrols in Adam Nicolson’s latest book.

I enrolled at the Bird School in early May, and it couldn’t have been more timely. In my slowly rewilding garden, there was so much going on. Blackbirds with chicks in the front hedge; great tits taking food every few minutes to one of the nest boxes; robins, sparrows and blue tits everywhere. And this beautiful book, a Prospectus and a Course Guide with subject headings — Absorbing – Occupying – Breeding – Singing – Reckoning – Reculturing — and full-page photographs by the author. I was an eager student from Day 1.

Adam Nicolson has designed a shed on stilts, built by a local carpenter and sited in the roughest part of his farm at Perch Hill in Sussex. It’s not a hide or an observatory, but something in between where both he and the birds can come and go, sleep over and rear their young. There’s a wood burner, a camping stove, nestboxes fixed to the timbers, a library and sacks of birdseed. He spends his first night there on January 19th and calls it the Bird House, the place where the birds do the teaching. But it is also a School and there needs to be a Curriculum, and some kind of Staff. The inspirers, among many — a kind of Senior Staff — are Uncle Toby in Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Julian Huxley, a serious scientist for whom an emotional response to nature was part of the analytical understanding of it, and the inestimable Gilbert White of Selbourne, especially his diaries.

Straight away, I’m learning to distinguish the male great tit from the female. I see the shine on his black head and the broader black stripe on his chest, and notice the amount of time he spends preening. Keeping himself in prime condition, advertising his testosterone testimonial as a healthy breeder. I discover the female’s atunement to the nearby oak tree that enabled her to delay the start of incubation so that the chicks hatched at peak time for oak moth caterpillars. All five of them fledged on May 15th. 

On May 9th, I see a chiffchaff for the first time in the garden. This tiny bird, beloved by Gilbert White, which may have arrived only a week ago from West Africa (some overwinter in the UK as the climate changes) has chosen to build a nest almost at ground level against the front wall of the house. The honour of it. Over the next few weeks, I watch the construction — dome-shaped with a side entrance, woven together from short sticks — and wait while the chiffchaff seems to have vanished (while incubating), only to reappear with insects in its beak. As I read Bird School, I feel I am mirroring in real time the range and depth of emotions Adam Nicolson is exploring at Perch Hill. When a magpie appears, I rush out shouting, and when it rains heavily in the night, I think about the tiny body sheltering her chicks. She is in my imagination constantly, along with gratitude that there is enough safety and the right kind of food for this wild creature to rear her young. In Adam’s words nothing matters more: not how things are, but that they are here.

Blackbirds have been powerful learning; teaching me to use to the utmost, the restricted hearing I still have.  I have taken to walking a particular path in the early evening to listen to the blackbird who sings there at that time. By the first week of June he seemed to be polishing a melody (which I could recognise) and trying out embellishments. It was different from other blackbirds in adjacent spots. The music historian Sylvia Bowden tells the story of Beethoven as a child in the woods around Bonn, listening to the astonishing repertoires of the blackbirds, committing them to memory and notebooks and using it as a treasure trove after he became totally deaf. Adam takes a research trip to Bonn in search of the ghost phrases that might still be there.

These are a few examples of what Bird School can do. What Adam Nicolson can do. It is the most annotated book I possess, and the one which has had a direct influence through the reading. Of course, a textbook works in a similar way, in the sense of giving answers when you need them — or the various apps and QR codes that are available now. But they are not about relationships. Not about how you feel in the presence of, in this case, a bird, but it could be, for example, a river or a tree. (Interestingly both Adam and Robert Macfarlane were speaking at the Hay festival on the same day in May…) It’s all in the quality of the writing. The attentiveness to whatever he touches so that it comes alive in his imagination and in mine when I’m reading. To look and listen with wonder and with love. The corpse of a raven — its stiff form as rigid as a dried cod — and as it goes on, I’m feeling with my fingers, the majesty of it — the spread of the primary feathers in the wing, no matter wasted, each rib as structural as a medieval vault.

*

‘Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood’ is out now and available here, published by William Collins.