Top 10 books about birds

As well as useful, beautiful guides to the avian world, the literature of birds includes potent memoir and uncanny fiction. Here are 10 titles to look out forBird books have been a constant presence in my life, from Ladybird Books to field guides via fiction and non-fiction with one thing in common. I can sit down with the RSPB Handbook of British Birds by Peter Holden and Tim Cleeves and soon find myself as engrossed as I would be by, say, Elizabeth Stott uncanny avian tale The Rhododendron Canopy. Many elements cross over between fiction and guide book: character and identification, habitat/setting, voice, movement/migration, even narrative arc in the form of a quest. I might be reminded of the time I went looking for choughs and got lucky, watching them for 20 minutes while lying on my stomach by a cliff edge, or I might wonder how many times I will have to go looking for nightjars before I actually see one rather than just hear their ghostly clicking.I wrote about nightjars in a story, The Churring, which appeared in my 2006 collection Mortality. Shortly after, inspired by walks in the woods and meadows between south Manchester’s Fletcher Moss Gardens, where the Plumage League was founded in 1889, and the River Mersey, I started writing, for a number of years, almost exclusively about birds. These stories have been collected, along with two new pieces, in Ornithology. If you visit my publisher’s website, be sure to have your volume turned up. Continue reading…
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