The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss

A New York Times Bestseller

From the best-selling authors of The Lost Words, a dazzling celebration of endangered birds.

The Book of Birds is a field guide with a difference: It shows readers not just how to identify birds, but also how to identify with them. Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris conjure the unique spirit of nearly fifty once-common species: avocet to yellowhammer, kestrel to kingfisher, skylark to nightingale. In lyrical and incantatory essays, Macfarlane describes each bird’s habits and habitats, their patterns of flight and patterns of song, how they hunt or fish or scavenge or gather, how they nest and raise their chicks, the myths that attend them, the threats that shadow them―and how their lives intersect with our own. On every page we encounter Morris’s exhilarating artwork, painted from life in watercolor and gold leaf, and animated with an extraordinary attention to detail. The Book of Birds is a love letter to the thrilling variety and mysteries of birdlife, and a clarion call to halt the rapid depletion of our skies.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

"You’ve never read a bird book like this one, written and illustrated in a spirit of determined awareness, augmenting facts with spirited play. . . . In this book words and pictures have equal importance. Ms. Morris’s illustrations don’t give us the usual frozen portraits of guide books, but birds in flight, in conflict or comedy. She’s less concerned with depicting every feather than offering us glimpses of vitality. . . . The Book of Birds is, like poetry, a form of memory, recovery and ritualizing delight. . . . The book educates without dullness."
― David Mason, Wall Street Journal

"A love letter to our feathered friends. . . . Each entry is a prose poem aimed at evoking the spirit and the unique qualities of each bird"
― Fiona Sturges, Guardian

"[T]he joys of bird-watching span the globe, as does [Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris's] invitation to revel in and protect the multispecies worlds of which we humans are one part."
― Barbara J. King, NPR

"From flight patterns to song, myth and mating rituals, each bird is celebrated in Morris’s vibrant paintings and Macfarlane’s lyrical accompanying notes."
― National Geographic

"The Book of Birds is no mere catalog of endangered species. It’s a lovingly produced introduction to what Macfarlane calls 'the seven wonders of birds' . . . Full-throated prose poems flag distinguishing habitats, habits, and character traits that make the birds come alive in a way that more traditional field guides do not."
― Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Mointor

"It is love that radiates from the pages of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s exquisite The Book of Birds. . . . No one has drawn out the poetry of birds more truthfully, more tenderly than Robert Macfarlane, his rhythmic incantations summoning the birds one by one, subject by subject, in all their fierce, fragile wonder."
― Maria Popova, The Marginalian

"In this field guide like no other, preeminent nature writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris have again joined forces to inform and entrance. . . . Gorgeous and lyrical. . . . Macfarlane's dynamic descriptions are veritable prose poems in their rhythmic cadence, imaginative metaphors, and evocation of each bird's distinct personality. . . . [alongside] Morris's spirited and elegant paintings. A radiant, exhilarating, and invaluable creation."
― Donna Seaman, Booklist

"The ordinary becomes extraordinary in this ode to the wonders of the natural world. Bird lovers will be delighted."
― Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Detailed, sumptuous. . . an evocation or a prayer over the memory of birds that risk being forgotten."
― Kirkus Reviews

"With paintings by Morris and words by Macfarlane, the book is a twist on the classic field guides that inspired both authors, evoking the spirit and poetry of birds from avocet to yellowhammer."
― Patrick Barkham, Guardian (UK)

"A love letter to our feathered friends."
― Observer