MARK COCKER

It takes a whole universe to make one small black birdThe bestselling author of Crow Country and writer of the Guardian s Country Diary tells the story of all life on Earth through a single day spent in the company of swifts A jewel of a book CAROLINE LUCAS MP One of our greatest living naturalists SPECTATORSwifts are among the most extraordinary of all birds Their migrations span continents and their twelve week stopover when they pause to breed in European rooftops is the very definition of summer They may nest in our homes but much about their lives passes over our heads No birds are more wreathed in mystery Captivated Mark Cocker sets out to capture their essence Over the course of one day in midsummer he devotes himself to his beloved black birds as they spiral overhead Yet this is also a book about so much more Swifts are a prism through which Cocker explores the profound interconnections of the whole biosphere From the deep sea thermal vents where life was born to the 15 million degrees at the core of our Sun he shows that life is a singular and glorious continuum These birds without borders are a perfect symbol to express the unity of the living planet But they also illuminate how no creature least of all ourselves can be said to be alive in iso

It takes a whole universe to make one small black birdThe bestselling author of Crow Country and writer of The Guardian s Country Diary tells the story of all life on Earth through a single day spent in the company of swifts A jewel of a book Caroline Lucas MPSwifts are among the most extraordinary of all birds Their migrations span continents and their twelve week stopover when they pause to breed in European rooftops is the very definition of summer They may nest in our homes but much about their lives passes over our heads No birds are more wreathed in mystery Captivated Mark Cocker sets out to capture their essence Over the course of one day in midsummer he devotes himself to his beloved black birds as they spiral overhead Yet this is also a book about so much more Swifts are a prism through which Cocker explores the profound interconnections of the whole biosphere From the deep sea thermal vents where life was born to the 15 million degrees at the core of our Sun he shows that life is a singular and glorious continuum These birds without borders are a perfect symbol to express the unity of the living planet But they also illuminate how no creature least of all ourselves can be said to be alive in isolation We are all inextricably connected Dra

There are 10,500 species of bird worldwide and wherever they occur people marvel at their glorious colours and their beautiful songs. We also trap and consume birds of every kind. Yet birds have not just been good to eat. Their feathers, which keep us warm or adorn our costumes, give birds unique mastery over the heavens. Throughout history their flight has inspired the human imagination so that birds are embedded in our religions, folklore, music and arts. Vast in both scope and scale, Birds and People explores and celebrates this relationship and draws upon Mark Cockers 40 years of observing and thinking about birds. Part natural history and part cultural study, it describes and maps the entire spectrum of our engagements with birds, drawing in themes of history, literature, art, cuisine, language, lore, politics and the environment. In the end, this is a book as much about us as it is about birds.Birds and People has been stunningly illustrated by one of Europes best wildlife photographers, David Tipling, who has travelled in 39 countries on seven continents to produce a breathtaking and unique collection of photographs. The book is as important for its visual riches as it is for its groundbreaking content.Birds and People is also exceptional in that the author has solicited contributions from people worldwide. Personal anecdotes and stories have come from more than 650 individuals in 81 different countries. They range from university academics to Mongolian eagle hunters, and from Amerindian shamans to some of the most celebrated writers of our age. The sheer multitude of voices in this global chorus means that Birds and People is both a source book on why we cherish birds and a powerful testament to their importance for all humanity.

Since 1972 Mark Cocker has been a member of a community of obsessional people, almost all male, who sacrifice most of their spare time, a good deal of money, sometimes their chances of a partner or family, even occasionally their lives, for birds. Birders is the story of this community, of its characters, its rules, its equipment (only a certain type of notebook will do), and its adventures - often hilariously funny, Birders is also a work of love - the story of what birds can do to the human heart.

What does it mean to truly see the natural world? The Nature of Seeing is a celebration of the art and practice of paying close attention. Whether it is the sight of moonlight across a bedroom floor, or an owl as it hunts, or waxcap fungi that bulb up across the fields overnight - Mark Cocker encourages us to reclaim our innate gift for wonder and to see the living world in all its infinite detail and mystery.Through a series of diary entries describing his encounters with the natural world, he interrogates how we see and how it affects us at the most profound levels. In precise and lyrical prose, he shows us that seeing is a creative act that can both transform us and change the very world we share.Revelatory and profound, The Nature of Seeing is the culmination of a lifetimes love affair with the simple act of looking and all that it reveals.

Since 1972 Mark Cocker has been a member of a community of obsessional people, almost all male, who sacrifice most of their spare time, a good deal of money, sometimes their chances of a partner or family, even occasionally their lives, to watch birds. Birders is the story of this community, of its characters, its rules, its equipment and its adventures - many of which are hilariously funny, Birders is also a work of love - the story of what birds can do to the human heart.

After Mark Cockers glorious book, you will never look at a blackberry bush the same way again.Philip Hoare, New StatesmanIn 2001 Mark Cocker moved to Claxton, a small village in Norfolk. In a series of daily writings spanning the course of a year he explores his relationship to the landscape he lives in, to nature and to all the living things around him - the birds, plants, trees, mammals, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, bush crickets, grasshoppers, ants and bumblebees. Passionate, astonishing and inspiring, this book is a celebration of the wonder that lies in our everyday experience.Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Biology Book Award, the Jarrold East Anglian Book Awards, the New Angle Prize and theThwaites Wainwright Prize

In seven works of non-fiction, especially in Birders and the universally acclaimed Birds Britannica, Mark Cocker has established himself as one of the foremost writers on nature and wilderness. In his most lyrical work to date, he has drawn together the best of his writing on wildlife, mainly taken from columns for the Guardian and Guardian Weekly. These carefully distilled articles, over a hundred in all, illustrate some of his most enduring themes over the last twenty years - the magical dynamism of birds, as well as the subtle beauty, vast skies and wildlife riches of the Norfolk landscape. In its celebration of the natural world, the hugely varied selection also demonstrates a concern to champion the despised and neglected - rats, gulls, crows (the Black Beasts of his first section) - as much as it explores some of the most charismatic creatures on Earth - penguins, whales, lions and elephants. Cocker is equally good at evoking the commonplace mysteries of garden blackbirds and thrushs song, as he is the exotic otherness of mountain gorillas or the one-horned rhinoceros.With its attention to detail, especially the sharpness of perception and the precise use of language, the writing in A Tiger in the Sand shows qualities more usually associated with poetry than with prose.

One night Mark Cocker followed the roiling, deafening flock of rooks and jackdaws which regularly passed over his Norfolk home on their way to roost in the Yare valley. From the moment he watched the multitudes blossom as a mysterious dark flower above the night woods, these gloriously commonplace birds were unsheathed entirely from their ordinariness. They became for Cocker a fixation and a way of life.Cocker goes in search of them, journeying from the cavernous, deadened heartland of South England to the hills of Dumfriesshire, experiencing spectacular failures alongside magical successes and epiphanies. Step by step he uncovers the complexities of the birds inner lives, the unforeseen richness hidden in the raucous crow song he calls our landscape made audible.Crow Country is a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing. It is also a reminder that Crow Country is not ours: it is a landscape which we cohabit with thousands of other species, and these richly complex fellowships cannot be valued too highly.One Midsummers Day by Mark Cocker coming in June 2023.

From one of our greatest nature writers: how swifts act as a window into the unity of the living world.Mark Cocker spends a single midsummer day tracing the flight of swifts - birds that connect continents, climates and species. What begins as a quiet act of observation expands into an awe-inspiring reflection on the interdependence of life on Earth. Cocker moves from the skies above Britain to the deep ocean currents, solar energy and ecosystems that sustain all living things. This is nature writing of rare insight, beauty and vision a hymn to the marvel of movement and connection that binds our planet together.A jewel of a book Caroline LucasA beautiful, brilliant, mind-stretching and soul-flying book. Genius. Horatio Clare

Essential reading for anybody who cares about the future Henry Marsh, *New Statesman Books of the Year*A radical examination of Britains relationship with the land by one of our greatest nature writers.**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT GOLDEN BEER BOOK PRIZE 2019**The British love their countryside more than almost any other nation, yet they live in one of the most denatured landscapes on Earth. From the flatlands of Norfolk to the tundra-like expanse of the Flow Country in northern Scotland, Mark Cocker sets out on a personal quest through the British countryside attempting to solve this puzzle. Radical, provocative and original, Our Place tackles some of the central issues of our time whilst mapping out a future in which this overcrowded island of ours could be a place fit not just for human occupants but also for its billions of wild citizens.A tour de force By turns hopeful, melancholy, humorous and heartfelt BBC Wildlife Book of the Month

Another beautiful, revelatory country diary from one of the best nature writers in Britain.If youve never read Mark Cocker, then you must. His style is sharp, selfless, and wonderfully evocative, his knowledge deep and wide-ranging but lightly borne, his curiosity joyful and infectious.Mail On Sunday, Books of the YearFor seventeen years, as part of his daily writerly routine, the author and naturalist Mark Cocker has taken a two-mile walk down to the river from his cottage on the edge of the Norfolk Broads National Park. Over the course of those 10,000 daily paces he has learnt the art of patience to observe a butterfly, a bird, flower, bee, deer, otter or fly and to take pleasure in all the other inhabitants of his parish, no matter how seemingly insignificant. In turn these encounters have then been converted into literary epiphanies that are now a widely celebrated part of his work. In AClaxton Diary he has gathered some of the finest short essays that he has ever written on wildlife. They range over almost everything he can see, touch or smell, from the minute to the cosmic, from a strange micromoth called yellow-barred longhorn to that fiercest of winter storms the so-called Beast from the East.From the marvellous to the macabre, Cocker tries to capture nature without flinching and in its entirety. In so doing he provides us with a vision of an English country parish that for intimacy and precise detail is comparable with Gilbert Whites diary on Selbourne. Above all he reminds us that we are all just members of one miraculous family, fashioned from sunlight and the dust from old stars.