What to read to understand birds

The Peregrine by JA Baker (1967)

Written with a “magnesium-flare intensity”, JA Baker’s book is a document of obsession: the distillate of winters spent watching the peregrine falcons of Essex at a time when the DDT pesticide crisis threatened the population with local extinction. The prose burns and sings – reading it, one begins to see birds with glittering clarity. This is ornithology on acid. There is a happy, real-world postscript in that peregrine populations have since made a remarkable comeback, especially in our cities, where they use cathedrals and skyscrapers as their nesting sites, instead of crags and cliffs.

Field Guide to the Birds of Britain compiled by Reader’s Digest (1981)

The humble field guide seems to me an unsung literary form, with great powers to shape both imaginations and lives. This was the field guide I grew up with, having bought it aged 10 with a book token won as a school prize. Beautifully illustrated and subtly written, it taught me to tune my eyes and ears to the bird world that weaves almost continuously with our own. Forty years on, I still have the same copy, and I still go back to it for knowledge and inspiration.

The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson (2017)

Seabirds live fabulous, heroic lives. Pufflings (baby puffins) leave their parents when only a few weeks old, splash into the sea and paddle off to spend years alone in the North Atlantic. A migrating male shearwater once covered a straight-line distance of nearly 5,000 miles in 6.5 days. Adam Nicolson writes with loving precision and awe about these “ocean voyagers” – and reminds us of the fragility of their flourishing, as seas warm and food stocks deplete. Most seabirds are early-warning species: their fate is a foretelling of what is to come.

The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane & Jackie Morris is published by Hamish Hamilton (£35). Order a copy from The Observer Shop.

Photograph by Alan Price/Millennium Images, UK