Crow Country

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ISBN
9780099485087
 
Mark Cocker's brilliant description of his journeys in search of crows and ravens, birds that obsessed him and changed his life for ever.
Shortlisted for the 2008 _Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction_, "Crow Country" is Mark Cocker's brilliant description of his journeys in search of crows and ravens of England, birds that obsessed him and changed his life for ever.

Rooks and jackdaws are both members of the same bird family. To ornithologists the group is known as _the corvids_, to the layperson they are 'crows'. But to the Mark Cocker these two species have become a fixation and a way of life.

When he moved with his family to a rundown cottage in the Norfolk Broads he acquired first a naturalist's perfect home in the countryside, then the keys to a secret landscape. Twice a day flight-lines of rooks and jackdaws passed over the house on their way to a roost in the Yare Valley. Following them down to the river one winter's night, the author discovered a roiling, deafening flock of birds which rised at its peak to 40,000. 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.

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 pieces together the complexities of the birds' inner lives, the historical depth of the British relationship with the rook and the unforeseen richness hidden in that sombre voice, a raucous crow song that he calls 'our landscape made audible'.

"Crow Country" is a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing. It is also a celebration of the Norfolk countryside, of its oceanic flatness, its immense skies and of the human intimacies which have shaped it from generation to generation. Yet, the book is also a powerful restatement of the central importance of nature in human affairs. It asks us to recall that 'Crow Country' is not 'ours'. It's a landscape which we cohabit with thousands of other species and is all the richer for these complex fellowships.

"Crow Country" is the perfect companion to the wonderful *Birds Britannica*.

‘Luminously beautiful and dartingly intelligent’ _Richard Mabey_
More Information
Weight 0.159000
Author Mark Cocker
Availability IP
Department Natural History
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780099485087
Pages 224
Published 07/08/2008
Publisher Vintage
Section Natural History
Size Unfolded 20x13cm
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