Every morning when I walk my dogs, the first thing I hear is the melody of the skylarks as they rise vertiginously to a height that renders them invisible. And I find myself hailing these blithe spirits in the words of Shelley’s ode:
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
Just occasionally they drop to their nests on the ground. Then it is John Clare, the early-19th century “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet,” who gives me the words:
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o’er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed – not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop again
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy.
Clare, a countryman through and through, possessed an ornithological knowledge so intimate that his nest poems amount to a kind of empathic science. His nests are precisely observed structures, their materials catalogued with the exactness of a craftsman who knows the difference between horsehair and wool, dry grass and green. They are also freighted with an understanding of loss that was, for Clare, existential: the parliamentary enclosures that remade his local landscape –destroyed not only habitats but the grammar of place by which he understood himself. His solicitude for nests could not be separated from his understanding of what it means to be dispossessed of one’s own being. For Shelley, the music in the air, the sounds and sweet airs that give delight; for Clare, the vulnerability of that nest at risk of footfall. The contrast opens us to the difference in sensibility of the two Romantic poets and at the same time alerts us to both the wonder of birds in flight and the fragility of nests and eggshells.
Shelley thought that the lark was more poet than bird, and in this he is in a long tradition because birds and English literature have gone together for centuries – from the 12th-century “Owl and the Nightingale” through Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” to Romeo and Juliet arguing whether they have heard the nightingale or the lark (if the latter, time to get up, if the former the opportunity to make love one more time).
The prose tradition is equally rich. Think of Thomas Bewick, born a generation before John Clare. A Tyneside craftsman’s son, he published his History of British Birds in two volumes in 1797 and 1804 (land birds first, then waterfowl). The wood engravings he cut himself possess a quality that two centuries of reproduction have not diminished: they are alive. His birds do not stand at attention for the taxonomist; they preen and squabble, huddle against the cold, hover above water with predatory intent. Between the formal portraits Bewick inserted tiny vignettes with no ostensibly scientific purpose – a man walking home through snow, a country churchyard at evening – which give the work the quality of a memoir as much as a natural history. Charlotte Brontë understood this instinctively. It is Bewick’s British Birds that the young Jane Eyre reads at the opening of her story, finding in its tail-pieces, as she puts it, “a book within a book”.
Over a century later there was JA Baker, an Essex man who, despite his acute myopia, spent ten winters following peregrine falcons across the flat hinterland between Chelmsford and the Thames estuary. The Peregrine is the record of those winters, though to call it a record is to use the wrong word. It is an act of pursuit so sustained that it becomes an act of self-dissolution. Baker wanted to move through the landscape as the bird moved through the air, shedding the human along the way. His prose, at once hallucinatory and precise, transports the reader into the falcon’s perceptual world, where prey is calculated in angles and velocities, and the land below is read as a map of thermals and shadows:
Morning was hooded and seeled with deep grey cloud and mist.
In ten seconds the hawk was down, and the whole splendid fabric, the arched reredos and immense fan-vaulting of his flight, was consumed and lost in the fiery maelstrom of the sky.
Evanescent as a flame, peregrines sear across the cold sky and are gone, leaving no sign in the blue haze above. But in the lower air a wake of birds tails back, and rises upward through the white helix of the gulls.
“Seeled” is not a misprint for “sealed”: it is, though transposed from bird to setting, a falconer’s technical term for the stitching up of the eyelid of a hawk. Shakespeare gave the same figure to Macbeth: “Come, seeling night,/Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day.”
Robert Macfarlane, the most admired nature writer of our time, has acknowledged his debt to the prose of The Peregrine:
Adjectives and nouns wrenched into verbs; surreal similes; flaring adverbs: these are among the specifics that make up his unique gestalt. “Five thousand dunlin… rained away inland, like a horde of beetles gleamed with golden chitin.” “The north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedges.” A yellow-billed cock blackbird is “like a small mad puritan with a banana in his mouth”. A wood pigeon dead on a winter field “glow[s] purple and grey like broccoli”.
I’ve never taken LSD: thanks to Baker, I don’t need to. His Essex is landscape on acid: super-saturations of colour, wheeling phantasmagoria, dimensions blown out and falling away, nature as hypernature. Baker has inspired many imitators over the years, aiming to riff and rip to a comparable intensity of description. I’ve been one of them.
Macfarlane has now brought his self-acknowledged Baker-likeness to its apogee. Together with the artist Jackie Morris he has produced the sumptuous The Book of Birds, a “field guide” to 49 declining species: “A great thinning of the skies is underway,” they begin, suggesting that we are on the way to what the prophetic writer Rachel Carson, channeling Keats, called a “silent spring” where “no birds sing”. Oddly, when Macfarlane and his collaborator come to their acknowledgments at the end they make no reference to Baker, silently occluding The Peregrine despite nodding to a full spectrum of ornithological classics, from Bewick to “Enid Blyton (ed), Birds of the Wayside and Woodland”. But there is no escaping the Baker-lite quality of the prose: “You’re true ghost, Hen Harrier, pure ghost, holy ghost. You coast silver-grey and spectre-silent over heather and hag, past stream and fence-post; you close-quarter the ground low and slow; watching, listening, in that shifting, sifting drift across land you make.”
Macfarlane’s prose is not to everyone’s taste. Like all great writers, he is open to parody. Write a sentence about a particular species of bird in the style of Robert Macfarlane, I asked Claude.ai. In a millisecond it came back with: “The woodcock, that roding phantom of the dusk-wood, stitches itself through the gloaming on its strange, blunt wings – a creature less seen than sensed, a smudge of the in-between.” Which is not so far from the real thing when that particular long-billed game bird makes its appearance as the penultimate specimen in the book: “Woodcock, aloft in your courtship dance, letting loose those croaking, drumming calls that echo in the listener’s ear, muffled but powerful, like timpani coming from far away, or detonations heard in a whale’s cochlea.” You can take it or leave it. Personally, I take it because the wonder, the imagination and the care for the fragility of the non-human world amount to more than the weight of the prose.
Besides, anyone who is interested in birds, or in search of a gift for a twitching friend, will relish Jackie Morris’s glorious colour illustrations of each species and its egg. Her images give the impression that, from avocet to yellowhammer via kingfisher and ptarmigan, the bird has alighted briefly on the page and might, at any moment, be gone. Which, in our time of pesticides, climate change and habitat loss, some of them soon will be.
The first line of Simon Barnes’s How To Fly: Taking Wing with Birds, Bats, Insects and Humans leads the reader to believe that we are in for some Bakeresque freewheeling: “I never saw a swift without wanting to be one.” But in fact the prose remains grounded: chatty, journalistic, alive with personal anecdote, but always informative.
Where Macfarlane’s swifts swoop “in their peloton packs – a volley of brown-black rockets on elliptical tracks, gliding whipcrack-fast and marble-smooth on those banking curves, then slingshotting out along the straights, the whole gang high on speed and glee”, Barnes gives us the plain facts: “Swifts have been fitted with tracking technology designed for mobile phones, a backpack weighing no more than a dozen grams, and it’s shown unequivocally that some individual swifts spend ten months in the air at a time, never touching the ground at all, never for a second perching on anything.” He is fascinating on their aerodynamic equivalence to hummingbirds and the fact that in order to sleep on the wing, the two halves of a swift’s brain take it in turns to nap.
The book is about the science of flight, from dragonflies to flying squirrels to Concorde and even vampires, but the birds are its winged heroes. It is an education. So, for example, we learn of “the classic example of exaptation” (a trait evolving for one purpose but eventually serving another): “Feathers didn’t evolve for flight. They evolved for a quite different purpose [insulation]. Flight was just a lucky accident.” My only disappointment was that – unless, distracted by a bird on the wing, I missed it – there was no explanation of that most astonishing of bird sights, which you sometimes see in a winter field at dusk: a few hundred starlings become a thousand and more, and the murmuration turns and tilts and breathes as a single organism, making shapes that have no name but that turn the sky into a swirl of abstract art and you gasp with wonder and with gratitude.
Jonathan Bate’s books include John Clare: A Biography (Picador)
The Book of Birds
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Hamish Hamilton, 384pp, £35
How To Fly
Simon Barnes
Bloomsbury, 368pp, £22
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This article appears in the 17 Jun 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Race