The title page of The Book of Birds features the subtitle “A Field Guide.” That is, at least in the conventional sense, a misnomer. The Book of Birds is a hefty hardcover, 7 by 10 inches, and is not the ideal, lightweight volume to be bundled in a rucksack and taken birding. Also, a Canadian audience would not spot many of the birds featured within at Point Pelee, Quill Lakes International Bird Area or Vaseux Lake Migratory Bird Sanctuary. With certain exceptions, like puffins and kestrels, the birds documented in this text are found in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. If you’re looking for a portable guide to local species the Royal Ontario Museum’s Field Guide to Birds of Ontario is an excellent choice, as is the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of the United States and Canada―East.
The Book of Birds is a different animal from the typical field guide. An edition of the book published in the US included the subtitle “A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss.” That is more accurate, as the book itself is wondrous, and through evoking wonder in the reader, seeks to galvanize them into action, to conserve the beautiful avian species that soar above our heads and prevent the further loss of their numbers and their habitats.
The Book of Birds, with its poetic descriptions and beautiful artwork, transports readers to faraway marshes and glens, to shorelines and forests, lands of dreams and primal memories.
Written by Robert Macfarlane with illustrations by Jackie Morris, The Book of Birds is the spiritual successor to their project The Lost Words. The same theme undergirds them both, which is that in order to revere nature and protect it, we must foster a deep, personal connection with it. The creators of these books don’t think that can be done with facts alone, but with poetry and other aesthetic connections. The premise is, simply, we don’t marvel at a red-tailed hawk by understanding its scientific name is Buteo jamaicensis and that it weighs anywhere from 1.5 to 3.5 pounds. We marvel at it when seeing it soar overhead, rarely needing to flap its wings as it rides the thermals. We marvel at seeing it swoop down into the brush and rise up with a snake in its talons. We marvel at its piercing cry.
The Book of Birds, with its poetic descriptions and beautiful artwork, transports readers to faraway marshes and glens, to shorelines and forests, lands of dreams and primal memories. It contains some of the most beautiful nature writing since J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine or Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. It does not blandly describe the seasons in which species mate or migrate, it allows the reader to experience them, to feel the mist as the morning sun shines across a meadow in Hampshire, or a cold wind that blows in from off the Atlantic coast.
The Book of Birds is a must for bird and wildlife enthusiasts, perhaps the perfect read for the cottage or the long, winter months when the majority of birds have flown south. The lyrical descriptions and beautiful illustrations are a delight to experience, regardless of whether the species being profiled are familiar or entirely new to the reader. One can only hope that The Book of Birds accomplishes its mission and serves as an impetus to conservation, rather than a record of the wonderous world of birds that was lost.
ROBERT MACFARLANE‘s Sunday Times– and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic-novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
JACKIE MORRIS has written or illustrated over seventy books, including the beloved children’s classics Tell Me a Dragon and East of the Sun, West of the Moon and a volume of modern folklore for readers of all ages, Wild Folk, co-created with Tamsin Abbott, as well as introducing and illustrating Barbara Newhall Follett’s gem of wild literature, The House Without Windows. She is the internationally bestselling and award-winning co-creator of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, two books which have captured the hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers of all ages. In 2018 she won the Kate Greenaway Medal and the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year for The Lost Words. Her artwork is held by public art collections in the UK and USA and has been published in the New Statesman, Independent and Guardian among other venues. She tours and performs with the Spell Songs ensemble around the UK, and is a Fellow of Herefordshire Art College.
Publisher: House of Anansi Press (May 7, 2026)
Hardcover 6.57″ x 9.65″ | 384 pages
ISBN: 9781487007515
Jeff Dupuis is a writer and editor living in Toronto. He is the author of The Creature X Mystery novels and numerous short stories, which have been published in The Ex-Puritan and The Temz Review among others. Jeff is the editor, alongside A.G. Pasquella, of the anthology Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction from the Future of Food, which will be published in 2025 by Dundurn Press.
