A Celebration and a Call to Care
A Review of
The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss
Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris
Hardcover: W.W. Norton, 2026
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Reviewed by C. Christopher Smith
on Jackie Morris’s website…
I’ve loved birds my whole life. My mom is a bird lover and taught me at a young age to pay attention to and identify birds. It’s not surprising then that I also have a fondness for books about birds, and dozens of my favorites are scattered throughout the shelves of my office. These books about birds are some of the most beautiful and colorful that I own. However, I don’t know that I own a bird book more beautiful than the new volume, The Book of Birds by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris. I own a fairly recent republished edition of John James Audubon’s classic, Birds of America, and even it is not as beautiful as The Book of Birds.
Subtitled A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss, the book features 49 species of birds “all of whom are, or have recently been, on a so-called ‘Red List’ or ‘Amber List’ of conservation concern. [Each species] is beginning to glitch, to struggle, to sputter. Each is slipping from our cities, fields, hills, rivers, forests, coasts, and seas. Each has somewhere started the slow slide towards the absolute dark of extinction” (11). The 49 species are grouped into seven groups of seven that highlight a particular wonder of their existence as birds: Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight, and Migration. Each species is heralded with a mini-essay of about three pages, written by MacFarlane, who is well-established as one of the greatest living nature writers, and also with a two-page color spread painted by Morris, as well as smaller paintings that are interspersed with the essays. (The Book of Birds is solely illustrated with paintings, and contains no photographs.)
This gorgeous book is centered on the question, posed by MacFarlane in the foreword: “What is lost when birds are lost?” MacFarlane’s words and Morris’s paintings convey the wonder inherent in each of these species. In the section on the wonder of flight, MacFarlane writes of the starling: “Over the marshes of Jutland, up to a million starlings flock together in winter. Could we ever know how it feels to surrender self to group like this? No leader – just each bird changing course in response to its neighbour. Watching you turn and swerve en masse, Starling, watching your tiny bodies burn their energy on a cold December dusk, it’s not hard to see joy in that dance as you wrap yourself in the fading light – and it’s hard not to be moved by the way you murmurate: by the staggering beauty and the mutual safety that both emerge when living beings cooperate.” Having been captivated by murmurations of starlings in flight over this city, I find MacFarlane’s words ring true; this wonder of creation is one that would sorely be missed if starlings were to go extinct.
The Book of Birds is a magnificent work, one that will inevitably charm not only bird lovers, but anyone who has eyes and ears that are tuned in gratitude to the many natural wonders of creation.
on Jackie Morris’s website…
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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