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The first time I met a bird close-up, it was dead. A raven. Even seeing it on the side of the mountain road in Crete was a shock: a large, dark splayed body the size of a small dog. I stopped the car and got out, not quite certain if I would find a wounded animal, enraged at its fate and frenzied in pain. But it was properly dead. Whatever it had once been had left. Holding its rigid form—all looseness and flexibility gone; it was as stiff as a dried cod—feeling my way around it, rustling open its wing feathers, pushing through the soft plumage on its nape and back, was like exploring a derelict house. Rafters, furnishings, upholstery, timbers, abandonment. It had been shot and its bill was bloodied in gouts toward the point, yet the midnight blue of its back and wing shimmered in my hands, each sheathing layer overlapping the next in soft-edged scales.
The bird felt like a miracle of construction: the splitting-axe of its bill, more paleo than any piece of bird-body I had ever seen, capable of crushing the skull of a rabbit in one slow, final closure; the nape that it ruffles and raises in both anger and desire; the spread of the primary feathers in the wing, no matter wasted, each rib as structural as a medieval vault, as fine as necessary, graded in width and strength from outer to inner and from tip to root.
And then the claw, dirty from life, knobbled like a Malacca cane, the darkness giving way, as an undertaker’s shoe might when muddied beside the grave, to a leathered practicality, armored against the world and padded against rock.
The dead bird was not the bird. The body seemed only to have been the means by which the bird could have become itself. But that moment of closeness to such an animal was the beginning of something for me.
I had never paid much attention to birds. For whatever reason—perhaps because everyday birds were too small, too evasive, too difficult to know, requiring too much patience and too much submission to their ticky little habits—I had not cared about them. Or not bothered to care.
The dead bird was not the bird. But that moment of closeness was the beginning.
My family had never been troubled by them. My father—no naturalist—was always more interested in looking across a bit of country than in what it might be made of. The view was the thing, not the plants or animals in it. As a boy I never chose to understand the birds or tried to learn the songs or calls. I did love seabirds—big, obvious, loud, heraldic, unmistakable—and came to know them on our annual holidays in Scotland, but the birds in the wood or the garden at home remained a blank, a flicker of nothing much, like motes in sunlight.
Why this indifference? Perhaps because attending to the birds seemed marginal to the bigger stories. Perhaps because my father looked down on anything like that. He built himself a gazebo—an 18th-century joke: “I will gaze,” as a fusion of Latin and English—on the corner of the garden from which he could survey a stretch of country “unchanged since Jane Austen saw it,” as he would often say.
A view, or a landscape as it was always more grandly described, precludes a love of anything else and as the naturalist Mark Cocker described in Our Place, his excoriating 2018 account of the failure of modern nature organizations to attend to the well-being of nature, this view-addiction has presided over a destruction of everything else. Perhaps because of an inherited taste for parkland, carpet has seemed better than vitality, smoothness than mess. The Britain Cocker portrayed has fetishized a “landscape beauty almost devoid of biodiversity … Nature is slipping away from these islands … Not since the last ice age has Britain been so stripped bare of its natural inhabitants.” In common with that presiding culture, I had walked thousands of miles across a diminished Britain without ever truly recognizing what was or wasn’t there.
Later, when I encountered bird people who had spent their years of apprenticeship learning and attending to the birds, I slid past them. I remember in Turkey, making a radio program on Homer with my friend and lifelong birder Tim Dee. As we stood together on the Trojan plain, perched on the slopes of a Bronze Age tumulus known as the Tomb of Achilles, he said he could hear a woodlark singing above us. I began to talk into his woolly microphone about the beauties of that place, its oak woods, its leaning, creaky olive groves, the lionskin of late-summer grasses, the endless, homeless north wind blowing across from the steppes, and said something about “the song of a lark high above us.” Tim stopped me: “Not a lark, a woodlark.” He can never watch a film without agonizing over the presence of the wrong birds at the wrong time of year on the soundtrack.
We started again and I said “lark” again and I remember his frustrated, raised eyebrows and the pursed lips of the radio producer who remains silent, his eyes on the horizon, as his contributors mouth idiocies.
It is a reproachful memory, symptomatic of a certain frame of mind. And so a couple of years ago I decided to embark on an attempt to encounter birds, to engage with a whole and marvelous layer of life that I had lived with in a kind of blindness and deafness for decades.
I have come to think that the inaccessibility of birds is the heart of their marvelousness.
I wanted to look and listen, to return to Bird School and see what it might teach me. I knew it would be long, slow and bitty. Birds don’t easily offer themselves up and in that way differ from our modern experiences in which the wanted or desired is almost constantly available. Birds move too fast or are too far away. We summon their alarm. Their concealment is occasionally interrupted only by a flickering, transient, uncertain presence. “Nature likes to be hid,” Heraclitus wrote in Ephesus 2,600 years ago and as such birds are the opposite of a landscape view that lays itself out in a kind of horizontal, placid seductiveness. Birds refuse that subjugation. They are often on the run, intent on a life in which the human observer is merely a threat or annoyance. They know how to fly away, neatly like owls or buzzards, with a kind of disdainful calm, or like pigeons with a grand fluster of feathers and noise, or blackbirds with a car-alarm-disturbed-terror- shriek; or to hide and creep, to stay still and silent, like the snipe or woodcock in the most anxious stillnesses in nature, to warn each other of some alien mammal in the neighborhood and to observe us far more than we ever observe them.
Experiments have shown how much they dislike the threat that a human eye represents. They don’t like being looked at, and birds, if you look at them too hard, will fly away. The eyespots on butterfly wings are designed to alarm bird predators and the reaction of most birds, especially in the young, is to take flight. The response is more powerful when it is a watching face; a pair of eyes is more frightening to them than a single eye-shaped form and one can experiment with this: watch with your hand over one eye and the birds might be untroubled. Remove it and they will flee. Deep in their adaptive minds is the knowledge that predators have their eyes in the front of their heads, giving them the necessary, wide, binocular gaze, and it is that double, watching, hungry vision that birds fear and avoid.
We bring terror in our wake. Charles Foster, the English writer on the wildness of animals, has said that whenever he wanders into the section of a bookshop called “Birdwatching,” he looks for those books that might describe or try to describe the experience of birds watching us.
What do they make of us? What is that large mammal that likes to stop on its walk through the wood and somehow transform its little eyes into a pair of bug-eyed predatory lenses with which it tracks us as we pass?
Could we ever trust it? What is its world, its intention? What does it want?
I have come to think that the inaccessibility of birds is the heart of their marvelousness. Both concealment and their capacity for distance and height is their form of pride. We do not own them. They possess themselves, even as their indifference makes us long for them. “You don’t hear birds, you hear worlds,” Olivier Messiaen, the great French composer, once wrote. That unknowable otherness, the way in which they represent the complex, involved presence of entire life systems that are not-us but are somehow interleaved with our own, is the source of the birds’ beauty. They are unknowability itself alive in front of us, colored, feathered, voluble, quick, inaccessible, with something fractal about them, so that the more you look, the less you know. Or perhaps the more you look, the more you know how little you know. You can only be led toward them, as if into a mystery. 
Excerpted from Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood by Adam Nicolson. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Adam Nicolson. All rights reserved.
Lead image: A raven. Credit: Piotr Krzeslak / Shutterstock
