Robert Macfarlane & Jackie Morris: The Book of Birds @ EPIC Studios

Robert Macfarlane & Jackie Morris: The Book of Birds A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss in conversation with Patrick Barkham Approx running times: Robert & Jackie in conversation with Patrick 7pm – 7.45pm Q&A with audience TBC 7.45 – 8pm Book signing 8.15 – 9.15pm  This is a ‘Norwich Arts Centre presents’ event at EPIC Studios, 112-114 Magdalen St, Norwich NR3 1JD. 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 presently 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.

All 49 of the birds who feature in the book have suffered significant declines in range or population over the past half-century; all 49 are or have recently been on the so-called ‘Red List’ or ‘Amber List’ of conservation concern. All 49 bird species included in the book have breeding, passage or wintering populations in the United Kingdom.