Book description
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.
Mark Cocker is one of Britain's foremost writers on nature and
contributes regularly to the
Guardian
and other publications. All of his seven books, including the
universally acclaimed
Birds Britannica,
deal with modern responses to wilderness, whether found in landscape,
human societies or in other species
.
His latest book,
Crow Country
, was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2008 and won the New
Angle Prize for Literature 2009.
He is currently working with the photographer David Tipling on their
joint magnum opus, Birds and People. He lives deep in the Norfolk
countryside with his wife Mary Muir and their two daughters.
