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Adam Nicolson’s Bird School is not school as the rest of us remember it. At Bird School, looking out of the window is actively encouraged; inquisitive interest is normal and absolutely no one is going to bully you for your lunch money. There is philosophy, English, history, geography and maths, of a sort: this is the syllabus that Nicolson uses for learning more about the common birds around him. 

Nicolson was a late enroller – another writer who came late to a love of birds – and with the zeal of a convert who happens to own a farm in the ‘damp, tree-thick country’ of the Sussex Weald, he builds a shed on stilts, with windows, a wood burner and nestboxes. A luxury hide, or in his words, ‘a small laboratory for passive connectedness’. From there his view opens out to the entire world. The narrative is not limited to the Eurasian Blue Tits Cyanistes caeruleus that come to his feeders, but his hide is the jumping-off point for a story of birds that weaves from Archaeopteryx and the evolution of flight to the migration of the Swainson’s Thrush Catharus ustulatus, what Keats was actually listening to in his Ode to a Nightingale, and the mythology of Common Ravens Corvus corax. Together all these disparate things become a quilt: partly of the wildlife in the woods immediately in front of his luxury hide/laboratory, and partly of what we’ve done to the birds (and what they have done to us). 

Nicolson’s greatest strength as a writer is in his research: the book is thorough and exhaustive, sometimes exhausting in its completist’s approach to studies. His tit chapter begins with the effect of sunshine on serotonin, before considering the effect of testosterone on Eurasian Blue Tits, predation by Great Spotted Woodpeckers Dendrocopos major of tit nests, the meaning of the patterns on Eurasian Blue Tit eggshells, the effect of ultraviolet markings on Eurasian Blue Tit crowns, and the numbers game of life in the woods in spring. It ends with a quotation from The Iliad. This is bird school. You are here to learn.  

This approach does lead to us being read into dead ends. I love a Eurasian Blue Tit as much as anyone else but I’m not quite sure what to do with all the knowledge I have just learnt – it has little practical use in the field other than awe. Awe is fine but it sometimes stays abstract if not anchored. The chapters where he meets experts – Sylvia Bowden on Common Blackbird Turdus merula song and Richard Broughton on Marsh Tits Poecile palustris – are the most focused and fulfilling. Paradoxically, because the Blackbird chapter has a sustained focus on Beethoven, and Broughton’s Marsh Tits usher in a discussion of how to repair our damaged landscape, that awe is situated in a usable, understandable context. We learn what birds can tell us about people and place. 

Literary style is a personal matter. What one reader likes, another abhors. There are sentences I find strange: a Song Thrush Turdus philomelos is likened to Andy Williams and Shirley Temple, bluebells Hyacinthoides to the lighting in a nightclub. Yet there are moments of beauty, too: ‘birds are vessels for our hopes and longings. We want to see beauty and possibility in them, to identify with their quickness, their brightness, their liberty.’ Alongside this, the book is liberally illustrated with realistic photographs – often with a leaf or branch in the way – and graphs and artworks. An appendix, a brisk guide to what common birds look like, is illustrated with Bewick’s woodcuts and a QR code links to the relevant birdsong recording on www.xeno-canto.org. 

In its synthesis of fact and experience, and its thoroughness, Bird School has much to recommend it; but whether you will enjoy it will come down to taste and your appreciation for the minutiae of knowledge that might not actually be useful to know.

Stephen Rutt