The complexities of the dawn chorus
'Tawny owls,' I tell friends and family, 'can't see in the dark any better than we can. So they memorise the whole wood! But they may be able to see sound,' I burble. 'And the Latin name for a blue tit is Cyanistes caeruleus obscurus: Heavenly hidden blue one!'
In Bird School, Adam Nicolson rejoices in the detailed stories of some of the birds on his farm in Sussex. Its precursor, The Seabird's Cry, a love letter to a dozen species, soared over the coasts of Scotland, ablaze with sea light. The Sussex Weald on a dull spring dawn offers a claggier setting. Puffins seem more interesting than marsh tits.
But in fact Bird School is even better. Nicolson makes like the bowerbird, which constructs elaborate artistic temples of seduction. Most of us, if we'd resolved to study local birds, would erect feeders and bird-boxes. Nicolson commissions an 'absorbatory' – a shed on stilts with nest boxes in the walls. He sets up his desk and brings birds, and an infinite world, to him. 'On moonlit dawns, each of the raindrops hanging from the tips of the birches and hazels held a bright white moon inside it like a fly in amber.'
Later in the year, in summer, he notices fledgling wrens emerging from their nest:
The little birds, as round as bumble bees, were dropping like drips from a tap out of the mossy cushion their parents had pushed into the gap in the brickwork. One after another they came, each one a gobbet of life.
This is some of the best English prose of our time. Trees respond to a storm like 'horses on a halter'.
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