Britain's birds are dying – here's what we'll lose

The poet Ted Hughes once memorably described the challenge facing any writer in describing an airborne crow. There are no words, he argued, to 'capture the infinite depth of crowiness in a crow's flight'. No phrase, no matter how well-chosen, could begin to do justice to the bird. Or, as Hughes bluntly put it, 'a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying'.
It's a cautionary tale to which few modern-day nature writers seem willing to pay heed. As sure as the swallows arriving each spring, there'll come a fresh wave of books attempting to capture birds' essence. Given the sheer proliferation of these avian volumes, in fact, one can't help but wonder whether they're intended to test, rather than convey, Britain's enduring love affair with birds.
Jon Gower's Birdland (★★☆☆☆) shows the perils of navigating this increasingly congested field. Gower, it's fair to say, is no arriviste to ornithology. As a teenager in the 1970s, he would regularly escape his claustrophobic family home in south Wales, cycling through old ash pits and marshes to lose himself in birdwatching. This book thus represents something of a culmination of that lifelong love affair: it sees Gower travel across Britain in pursuit of species from urban peregrines to the great bustards of Salisbury Plain.
You can't fault his dedication. Studying corncrakes on the Hebridean isle of Coll, he finds himself furiously pedalling his rented bike to keep up with a group of eminent ornithologists in a Land Rover. Each chapter is interspersed with interviews with conservationists attempting to protect Britain's birds against a backdrop of decades of decline. Yet his paths feel too well trodden. The case studies he highlights will be familiar to anyone with more than a passing interest in Britain's birds: the RSPB's Operation Turtle Dove, the kittiwakes on Newcastle's Quayside, Oxford 's Wytham Woods – famously one of the most studied tracts of woodland in the world – and, nearby, the swift colony on the roof of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Gower abridges these stories into individual, loosely connected chapters, and in the process he offers little more than a bird's-eye view. Oddly, at the same time, his research gets lost in the thickets of modern-day nature writing, meaning there is little here that feels original. At one stage, he recounts the highlights of a Robert Macfarlane Twitter thread about JA Baker's classic 1967 book The Peregrine; we're thus presented with the curious spectacle of one author writing about another author tweeting about another author who was writing on birds.
And as for the Ted Hughes test, a wren is described as a 'miniaturised, soft machine-gun spraying paper bullets of sound', and choughs as flying like 'an aerial clown-show'. At one stage, Gower even coins his own collective noun: a 'serenity of swans'. (There are already several words: flock, bevy, gaggle, herd.) For all his admirable passion, one can't help but wonder whether he might leave birdland to the birds for a while.
In Bird School (★★★★☆), Adam Nicolson seems more alert to the challenges, and perils, of his field. Early on, he cites the writer Charles Foster's claim that whenever he, Foster, is perusing the 'birdwatching' section of a bookshop, he'll seek out the titles that describe the experience of having birds watch us, rather than the other way around. And, instead of striking out in pursuit of birds, Nicolson instead constructs a hide in a field close to his home on the Sussex Weald. What follows is in part a deep topography of a local patch, and in part an exploration of the intricacies of the lives of the birds that reside there.
The result is deeply satisfying. 'We do not know each other and their lives are invisible to us,' Nicolson writes of the birds he watches. Instead of attempting to capture the unknowable, he draws upon an impressive depth of scientific and historical research to bring his subjects to life. Bird School works, to a degree, like a scrapbook, with Nicolson including old maps and notes – he records the exact sequence of birds singing in the dawn chorus – as well as a diary of the time he spends in the hide. He only loses focus when, on occasion, he ventures too far afield, as when he wanders the streets of Bonn in pursuit of blackbird song. When he stays put, Bird School is a worthy addition to a literary lineage that stretches back to the 18th-century writer and naturalist Gilbert White.
Above all, Nicolson's dispassionate style is effective at illustrating the threat to Britain's birds. At one point he produces a series of graphs demonstrating the precipitous collapse of our songbird population over the past 60 years: bullfinches, nightingales and swallows have declined by 50 per cent, skylarks by 60 per cent and turtle doves by 90 per cent. The roll-call of species lost, he writes, reads like a list of regiments decimated in battle. Across Europe as a whole, bird populations have fallen by nearly a fifth over recent decades, a loss of about 600 million birds from a total of 3.2 billion in 1980. That collective indifference to what he calls an 'ending of a multiple form of life' inspired him to write this book. Bird School, then, is a fitting title: we should learn to rekindle our enduring love affair with birds, before they vanish from our sight.

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