Environmental Book Group: Bird School
Close to Adam Nicolson’s home in Sussex, there is a forgotten field overrun by bracken and thicketed by brambles. Wanting to look and listen, to return to “bird school” and see what it might teach him, Nicolson built a small shed among the trees, a kind of man-sized birdhouse he calls an “absorbatory,” complete with nesting boxes and bird feeders. Cocooned inside season after season, he got to know the birds: where they nest, how they sing, how they mate and fight, what preys on them, what they are like as living things. Woven through with philosophy, literature, science, and a sense of wonder, always conscious that this is an age in which the natural world is under siege, Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, taking a long, careful, and concerned look at our relationship with the wild.
We will be meeting in person at the Nature Learning Center in Albany. However, there is also a Zoom link option for those unable to join in person.
