Crow Country [Hardcover]

Crow Country isn't just a profile of this very British bird, it's also a philosophy, a biography, an investigation and a wonderfully lyrical description of the British countryside. The subtitle "A meditation on birds, landscape and nature" is a perfect summary of this glorious slim volume: 192 pages of sheer joy. From the wonderful opening chapter where Mark Cocker almost literally paints with words the evening gathering of corvids in his local fields, I was totally wrapped up in this passionate and beautifully written book. The blurb describes this as a "prose poem". Too right. For me, this is one of the all-time great books on British natural history.

I was interested in birds once , even going as far as to spend my hard earned paper round money on a very expensive "Book Of British Birds"( which I still have, the book that is , not the paper round) , but then I became more interested in the flirtatious human kind and that was the end of that . So reading a book about the corvid family of birds -a family that includes crows, rooks, jackdaws , ravens, jays , choughs, magpies- wasn't the examination it might have been. It helps greatly that Mark Cocker strikes a vivid balance between his expert knowledge and accessibility.
Cocker is a committed naturalist, spending hours standing around in the flatlands near his Norfolk home waiting to catch glimpses of birds that many of us probably see , and take for granted every day of our lives. He admits this is bizarre but he is not just looking for individual birds or mating pairs but ostensibly for flocks .His writing about these masses of birds at dusk as they head off to roost is almost poetic and it's this literacy that also makes Crow Country such an enjoyable read. Entranced by a gathering of birds in the night sky Like "a gyroscope of tightly packed fish roiling and twisted by the tide" he surmises that their power over him is to "act like ink -blot tests drawing out of (his ) unconscious ".
Cocker then intersperses elements of autobiography and sociology into the narrative as he contrasts a birds migration with the human turmoil of moving house even going as far as to compare his recent upheaval from inner city Norwich to the Yare valley to a bird migration , driven by instinct- which will come as a surprise to Kirsty Allsop , a good thing I think.
This book though is not just set in Norfolk and is all the richer and more fascinating for it .Cocker travels from Dumfriesshire to the flat heartlands of South England observing or more pertinently sometimes failing to observe the birds in all their complexity . He also points out the symbiosis between the creatures and rooks, how crows form an integral part of British folk lore. Its persuasive , perspicacious and expressive, a deeply passionate exploration about how these birds "seemed to express as deep a homing instinct for our green and pleasant land as the English felt themselves" Or as it wonderfully observes how its raucous cry is "Our landscape made audible" .

This insight into the life of crows and the ways in which they have always impinged on human existence, is both fascinating and lyrical. The author betrays his affection for these intelligent birds on every page of this beautiful book.