From the creators of the internationally bestselling, award-winning, multi-adapted phenomenon The Lost Words: a dazzling celebration of birdlife in Britain, re-imagining the classic field guide for a new generation of nature lovers.

A great thinning of the skies is underway. Around 50% of bird species are in decline worldwide. Our dawns and springs are quieter each year than the last. An almost unimaginable abundance has been lost. It does not have to be this way –– but we will not save what we do not love.

The Book of Birds is a compendium of forty-nine bird species, from Avocet to Yellowhammer, all of which are declining or endangered in Britain. Inspired by the classic bird-books with which the authors grew up, this is a field guide with a difference. It asks not ‘What is that bird?’, but ‘Who is that bird?’ It shows its readers how to identify birds, but also how to identify with them.

With lyrical precision and playfulness, Robert Macfarlane evokes each bird’s habits and habitats –– their patterns of flight and of song, how they hunt and gather, how they nest and raise their young, the stories and myths which attend them, the threats which shadow them, and how their wild lives intersect with our own. And on every page we encounter Jackie Morris’s exhilarating artwork, painted in watercolour and gold and animated by an extraordinary attention to detail and sense of life. Set among this dazzling flock of species are seven sections celebrating the ‘Seven Wonders’ that together make up the everyday miracle of ‘Bird’: Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight and Migration.

Seven years in the making, The Book of Birds is a love letter to the splendours and mysteries of birdlife, and a clarion call to halt the loss of birds from land, sea and sky. From Dipper to Dunnock and Kestrel to Kingfisher, from mountain to ocean and city to river, Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane conjure the unique spirit and lifeway of each species. This is a book to be treasured by bird-lovers of all ages, and a future classic work of reference.

“Spellbinding and lyrical . . . A companion, helping you to discover wonder in the everyday . . . The significance of this beautiful book cannot be underestimated . . . Rooted in wonder, The Book of Birds has the power to persuade – to be the catalyst that reminds us all of what we stand to lose, and to spur us on to help our precious birdlife thrive once more” ― RSPB

“A vivid lexical treasury . . . dramatic, playful and designed to be read aloud . . . Macfarlane’s words have a tumbling, delirious, somersaulting quality . . . Morris’s watercolours, meanwhile, have a luminous shiver about them, not stiff and scientific, but seemingly reconjured from a first childhood sighting” ― Irish Independent

“It is love that radiates from the pages of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s exquisite Book of Birds — a passionate and rigorous subjectifying of the wonder of the winged, seven years in the making, part field guide and part ode… In the tradition of their Lost Spells and Lost Words (one of my all-time favorite books), the lyrical essays — tender as a lullaby, urgent as a warning bell — are accompanied by almost unbearably beautiful paintings, emanating a portrait’s reverence for reality and an icon’s fidelity to the poetic truth beyond the material fact…” —Maria Popova, The Marginalian

“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