On Sunday March 1 at 3PM the Brookline Bird Club is joining with the Boston Birding Festival and Massachusetts Association of Bird Clubs to sponsor a conversation with writer Adam Nicolson, the author of Bird School: A Beginner in the Woods. This webinar is open to all.

To learn the birds, the writer Adam Nicolson built an elevated shed as his own personal school, a man-sized birdhouse he calls an “absorbatory,” not an observatory, sited where and English garden and one-time farm, birds and humans, pasts and presents, blur together at the wild wood edge.

This is the spongy “rough ground” of Adam Nicolson’s recent book, Bird School: A Beginner In the Wood. The author of acclaimed works on history, landscape, and great literature, Nicolson is also a preeminent naturalist. He is the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award, and the Ondaatje Prize. His books include The Life Between the Tides and Why Homer Matters.

In his bird school classroom, Nicolson approaches the task of learning the birds with whatever tools he has on hand—philosophy, environmental science, poetry, music, history and more. His inventiveness and delight in discovery contributes to this book’s charm.  But he is also on a mission to be “in the world with as little conceptualization of it as the animals or maybe even the stones.”

“Every wood is a bird cosmopolis,” Nicolson writes from his classroom. “Every blink of life outside the birdhouse window is a planetary phenomenon.”

Running through Bird School is a worrying undercurrent of nature in crisis—declining species, vanishing habitat, ecological unraveling, a warming climate, and changing ground—and a insistence on engaging these challenges in new ways. Drawing on everything from biblical prophets and Mesopotamian farming practices, to Beethoven and the Merlin app, Nicolson invites readers to imagine a more porous, spongy fabric of being—one that includes birds and humans alike, not “shrink-wrapped” into tidy categories.

How to Register

This webinar is open to all.

To register please visit the Boston Birding Festival website and pick CLICK TO REGISTER:
https://www.bostonbirdingfestival.org/posts/bird-school-a-beginner-in-the-wood/

About the Author

Adam Nicolson, FSA, FSA Scot, FRSL (born 12 September 1957) is an English author who has written about history, landscape, great literature and the sea. He has worked as a journalist and in both radio and television. Between 2005 and 2009, in partnership with the National Trust, Nicolson led a project which transformed the land surrounding his house and garden at Sissinghurst into a productive mixed farm, growing meat, fruit, cereals and vegetables. He his son Tom were among the partners in a project to eradicate invasive predators from the Shiant Isles, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. In March 2018, the islands were declared rat-free.

About the Interviewer

Cara Giaimo is a science journalist who loves writing about our fellow species. You can find her work in the New York Times, Atlas Obscura, WIRED, and elsewhere. Cara lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Leaving the Ocean Was a Mistake: Life Lessons from Sixty Sea Creatures.

About the Boston Birding Festival

The Boston Birding Festival In partnership with environmental, cultural, and community leaders and organizations, the Boston Birding Festival seeks to create transformative experiences of collective awe that strengthen public understanding and appreciation of the natural world and contribute to increased environmental justice, conservation, and sustainability. We do this through the lens of birding.