Why I became an ornithologist

THe met a close -up of a bird, it was dead. A crow. Even to see him on the side of the mountain road in Crete was a shock: a large dark flared body of the size of a small dog. I stopped the car and I went out, not quite certain that if I would find an injured animal, rabid to its fate and frequented in pain. But it was properly dead. Whatever he has in the past. Holding its rigid shape – all the release and the disappeared flexibility; It was as rigid as a dried cod – making his way around him, rustling his wing feathers, pushing through the soft plumage on his neck and his back, it was like exploring an abandoned house. Rafters, furniture, padding, wood, abandonment. He had been shot down and his bill was bloodied in drops towards the point, but the midnight blue of his back and his wing sparkled in my hands, each coating layer riding the next scales with soft edges.

The bird looked like a construction miracle: the ax of fractionation of its bill, more paleo than any piece of bird body that I had ever seen, capable of crushing the skull of a rabbit in a slow and final closure; the neck which she rocked and raises both anger and desire; The propagation of primary feathers in the wing, it does not matter, each coast as structural as a medieval vault, as fine as it is necessary, was classified in width and force from the outside to the interior and from the tip to the root.

And then the claw, dirty of life, blocked like a cane from Malacca, the darkness that gives way, like the shoe of a funeral entrepreneur can be blurred next to the grave, leather practicality, armored against the world and padded against rock.

The dead bird was not the bird. The body seemed to have been only the means by which the bird could have become itself. But this moment of proximity to such an animal was the beginning of something for me.

I had never paid much attention to birds. For any reason – perhaps because everyday birds were too small, too elusive, too difficult to know, requiring too much patience and too much submission to their little bicky habits – I did not care about them. Or not bother to care about it.

The dead bird was not the bird. But this moment of proximity was the beginning.

My family had never been troubled by them. My father – no naturalist – was always more interested in looking at a little country than in what it could be done. The view was the thing, not plants or animals. As a boy, I never chose to understand birds where I tried to learn songs or calls. I loved sea birds – Big, obvious, noisy, heraldic, undoubtedly – and I knew them during our annual holiday in Scotland, but the birds in the wood or the garden at home remained white, a sparkle of nothing, like movements in the sun.

Why this indifference? Perhaps because participation in birds seemed marginal in larger stories. Maybe because my father looked up at something like that. There was a Gazebo – a 18th century joke: “I’m going to look”, like a fusion of Latin and English – at the corner of the garden from which he could question an extent of “unchanged since Jane Austen saw it”, as he often said.

A view, or a landscape as it has always been larger Our placeIts 2018 report of the failure of the failure of modern nature organizations to take care of the well-being of nature, this addiction of sight presided over the destruction of everything else. Perhaps because of a hereditary taste for the park, the carpet seemed better than the vitality, the sweetness than the mess. The British cocker spaniel has fetishized a “landscape beauty almost devoid of biodiversity … Nature is moving away from these islands … Not since the last glacial period, Great Britain has not been so stripped of its natural inhabitants.” In common with this president culture, I had traveled thousands of kilometers through a decrease in Britain without ever really recognizing what was or is not there.

Later, when I met people of birds who had spent their learning learning years and taking care of birds, I exceeded them. I remember Turkey, making a radio program on Homer with my friend and Birard for life Tim Dee. While we were getting together on the Trojan plain, perched on the slopes of a tumulus of the Bronze Age known as the tomb of Achilles, he said that he could hear a Woodlark sing above us. I started to speak in its woolly microphone of the beauties of this place, its oak woods, its tilted and creaky groves olive, the skin of lions of the grasses of the end of the summer, the northwind without shelter who blows in front of the steppes, and I said something on “the song of an alumus above us.” Tim stopped me: “Not a lark, a Woodlark.” He can never watch a film without dying on the presence of bad birds at the wrong time of the year on the soundtrack.

We have started again and I said “Lark” again and I remember his frustrated and raised eyebrows and the pinched lips of the radio producer who remains silent, eyes on the horizon, while his idiocy contributors.

It is a repressive memory, symptomatic of a certain state of mind. And so a few years ago, I decided to embark on an attempt to meet birds, to engage with a layer of life and wonderful with which I had lived in a sort of blindness and deafness for decades.

I came to think that the inaccessibility of birds is the heart of their wonder.

I wanted to watch and listen, go back to the bird school and see what it might teach me. I knew it would be long, slow and bitty. Birds are not easily proposed and differ in this way from our modern experiences in which desired or desire is almost constantly available. Birds move too fast or are too far. We invoke their alarm. Their concealment is sometimes interrupted only by a flickering, transient and uncertain presence. “Nature likes to be hidden,” wrote Heraclitus to Ephesus 2,600 years ago and, as such, birds are the opposite of a landscape view which presents itself in a sort of horizontal and placid seductivity. The birds refuse this subjugation. They are often on the run, determined to a life in which the human observer is only a threat or discomfort. They know how to fly away, perfectly like owls or buzzing, with a sort of disdainful calm, or as pigeons with a large embarrassment of feathers and noise, or black birds with a cars of car alarm; Or to hide and crawl, stay motionless and silent, such as snipe or wood in the most anxious sites in nature, to warn us mutually from an extraterrestrial mammal in the neighborhood and to observe us much more than we observe them.

Experiences have shown how much they do not like the threat that a human eye represents. They don’t like to be looked at and the birds, if you look at them too hard, will fly away. Eyes on the butterfly wings are designed to alarm bird predators and the reaction of most birds, especially among young people, is to take off. The answer is more powerful when it comes to an observation face; A pair of eyes is more frightening to them than a single form in the shape of an eye and you can experiment with this: look with your hand on one eye and the birds could be ingested. Remove it and they will flee. Basically their adaptive minds, the knowledge that predators have their eyes in front of their heads, giving them the necessary and wide binocular gaze, and it is this double, looked and hungry vision that birds fear and avoid.

We bring terror to our wake. Charles Foster, the English writer on the wilderness of animals, said that each time he walks in the section of a bookstore entitled “Birdwatching”, he seeks the books that could describe or try to describe the experience of the birds that look at us.

What do they do with us? What is this great mammal who likes to stop on his walk through the wood and transform his little eyes into a pair of predatory lenses in the eyes of insects with which he follows us over the pass?

Could we never trust him? What is his world, his intention? What does he want?

I came to think that the inaccessibility of birds is the heart of their wonder. The concealment and their distance and height capacity are their form of pride. We don’t have them. They own themselves, even if their indifference makes us succeed in them. “You don’t hear the birds, you hear worlds,” wrote Olivier Messiaen, the great French composer. This unknown otherness, the way they represent the complex presence and involved whole life systems which are not-Americans but which are somehow intertwined with ours, is the source of the beauty of birds. They are unknown himself alive in front of us, colored, feathers, voluptive, fast, inaccessible, with something fractal about them, so that the more you look, the less you know. Or maybe the more you look, the more you know how little you know. You can only be taken to them in a mystery.

Extract from Bird school: a beginner in wood by Adam Nicolson. Posted by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Adam Nicolson. All rights reserved.

Image of lead: a crow. Credit: Piotr Krzeslak / Shutterstock