There was a time when nature writers wrote like William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: ‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ Nowadays, they favour something more prosaic and fact-based, incorporating rapportage and first-person writing. However, there is still one among them who writes a heightened prose, evocative and incantatory. He is Robert Macfarlane, a praiser of place and landscape, who has parlayed his High Style into two collaborations with the illustrator Jackie Morris – The Lost Words and The Lost Spells – and now The Book of Birds (Hamish Hamilton 384pp £35), cheekily described as ‘a field guide’.

The Book of Birds is too big and heavy for use in the field, it includes only forty-nine British species, the washy watercolour illustrations lack detail and as for the words… Well, this book, writes Macfarlane, ‘asks not “What is that bird?” but “Who is that bird?” It wishes to help its readers to identify birds, of course, but also to identify with them.’ There are seven groups of seven birds in the book, arranged alphabetically, the groups separated by ‘seven wonders’ – Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight and Migration. Here is Macfarlane on the kingfisher: ‘Sun lights the touchpaper and – whooooooshhhh! – blue fuse burns air, sears sky, scorches eye, scratches stream’s skin. A glimpse of Kingfisher is vision-quake, double-take; a strafe-straight rake across the lake that leaves neon streaks in its afterburner wake, sets sight ablaze.’ And so on. If you like that sort of thing, this is the book for you. It is certainly a handsome volume, attractively illustrated, good for the coffee table or as a gift book. 

The Book of Birds begins by declaring that ‘a great thinning of the skies is under way’. This is a reference to the undoubted decline in overall wild bird populations – down by a third in North America between 1970 and 2019, by nearly a fifth in the UK over