Author Robert MacFarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris admire feathered friends in The Book of Birds

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It’s a long haul from the waters of Alaska to New Zealand’s Manukau Harbour, and when the Bar-Tailed Godwit reaches her destination “she collapses right there on the beach, too exhausted even to fold her wings or break her fast . . .”

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But the church bells will be ringing to hail her arrival.

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We’re reading about a feathered creature’s astounding 6,000-mile journey — or as award-winning writer Robert Macfarlane puts it, “a single, epic super-flight” by “migration’s undisputed record-breaker.”

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Magical moments like this permeate the pages of The Book of Birds, a gorgeously produced volume that pairs the evocative prose of Macfarlane, one of the world’s great chroniclers of nature and landscape, with the breathtaking illustrations of Jackie Morris.’

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The Book of Birds
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Anansi

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Whenever Macfarlane thinks about birds, he’s consumed by awe. You hear it in his voice when he talks to Postmedia about the Godwit’s unbroken journey across the hemispheres. “It’s the longest continuous flight that we know of,” he marvels.” “Yet we still don’t understand migration.”

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Macfarlane and Morris previously collaborated on The Lost Words, an award-winning best-seller about language. The present book is a celebration of bird life in all its wondrous variety and mystery, but it’s also a work of lamentation, arriving at a time when 50 per cent of bird species are in decline worldwide, and where in North America alone there are three billion fewer birds than half a century ago.

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“It’s a field guide of wonder and loss,” says Macfarlane, on the phone from his home in Cambridge, England. That makes it different from the field guides of the past. “Jackie and I both grew up reading them and loving them, but today the numbers are terrifying, and we could no longer write a normal guide under that shadow as it were.”

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Author Robert Macfarlane. Credit: Alex Turner.

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So instead they focus on the individual uniqueness and magic of 49 endangered species — from the Yellowhammer to the Nightingale. “Each is slipping from our cities, fields, hills, rivers, forests, coasts and seas. Each has started the slow slide towards the absolute dark of extinction.”

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Macfarlane, now 49, grew up in rural Nottinghamshire “at the end of a country lane. Birds have been a part of my life as long as I can remember. I grew up with nightingales, bitterns, peregrine falcons, even golden eagles. For me it’s continuing astonishment.”

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He worries that people take birds too much for granted these days. “But there are many like myself who can’t imagine life without them.” Macfarlane cites 19th Century records from Labrador “that talk of flight formations that were miles long. These numbers are unimaginable now.” He’s clear on what he hopes readers take away.

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“A sense of wonder, a sense of identifying with them and not just identifying them. A renewed passion to take action to help protect them from obliteration.”

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Sharing these pages with distinctive profiles of each of these endangered creatures are entertaining dissertations on what Macfarlane and Morris call the Seven Wonders “which today create the everyday miracle that we simply call ‘Bird’: the wonders of Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight and Migration.”

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No easy summations are possible if one takes a close look at any of these subjects. “A staggering variety of beaks alone are grounds for astonishment,” Macfarlane says. “Beak is tweezer, scissor, cleaver, trimmer siever, plucker, hammer, peeler, breather, stealer, spoon and killer,” his chapter begins. And that’s only the beginning. After all, he’s paying tribute to “a fine-tuned multipurpose marvel of technique, designed by time.”

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