This account of living among birds in a comfortable garden hide is fascinating but also melancholy as the author witnesses how few remainSaint 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.” Continue reading...