{"id":46438,"date":"2026-06-12T12:55:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T12:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/how-to-see-a-bird-robert-macfarlane-and-jackie-morriss-exquisite-illustrated-field-guide-to-the-wonder-of-the-winged\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T12:55:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T12:55:05","slug":"how-to-see-a-bird-robert-macfarlane-and-jackie-morriss-exquisite-illustrated-field-guide-to-the-wonder-of-the-winged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/how-to-see-a-bird-robert-macfarlane-and-jackie-morriss-exquisite-illustrated-field-guide-to-the-wonder-of-the-winged\/","title":{"rendered":"How to See a Bird: Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris\u2019s Exquisite Illustrated Field Guide to the Wonder of the Winged"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cSplit the Lark \u2014 and You\u2019ll find the Music, \u201d Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, \u201cNow, do you doubt that your Bird was true?\u201d <\/p>\n

In the wake of On the Origin of Species<\/em>, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the spirit of a creature \u2014 a distinction between scientific fact and poetic truth, between ways of looking and styles of seeing, Ursula K. Le Guin would capture an epoch later<\/a> with her astute observation that while both celebrate what they describe, science objectifies the universe by describing it from the outside, while poetry subjectifies it by describing it from the inside, and life is the land of subjects. <\/p>\n

With her short, searing insistence on the subject in the specimen, Dickinson was warning us that despite all the facts we may discover about birds in the epochs to come \u2014 now we know how they fly<\/a> and how they see<\/a> and what they dream about<\/a> \u2014 the truth about them, the poetic truth we may call spirit, will always remain elusive, irreducible, unreachable by means of reason, reachable only by love. A century after her, Rachel Carson \u2014 a scientist who wrote like a poet and sparked the modern environmental movement with her prophetic, poetic Silent Spring<\/em><\/a> \u2014 would insist that an indestructible sense of wonder<\/a> is our mightiest antidote to the silencing of the birds that augurs the erasure of nature. We forget, and need constant reminding, that the fruit of wonder as well as its fulcrum is not knowledge \u2014 none of our discoveries have kept three billion birds from vanishing<\/a> between Carson\u2019s lifetime and ours \u2014 but love. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Bullfinch by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is love that radiates from the pages of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris\u2019s exquisite Book of Birds<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a passionate and rigorous subjectifying of the wonder of the winged, seven years in the making, part field guide and part ode, animated by an I\/Thou<\/a> relationship that implicates both reader and read by addressing each bird directly as a subject rather than explicating an object. In this luminous lacuna between conservation and consecration, what emerges is the spirit in the species, the numinous in the named, the isness in the itness. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Common tern by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Gannet by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The foreword casts the spell and hands the summons:<\/p>\n

\n

What is lost when birds are lost? Above all, the creatures themselves, in their own splendour and right. And for humans \u2014 language, story, beauty, possibility, imagination, lifts of the spirit, ways of being otherwise. Birds are our place-makers, memory-keepers, calendars and clocks. They stitch the world\u2019s parts together: earth to sky, river to woodland, mountain to sea, country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Starling by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the tradition of their Lost Spells<\/em><\/a> and Lost Words<\/em><\/a> (one of my all-time favorite books), the lyrical essays \u2014 tender as a lullaby, urgent as a warning bell \u2014 are accompanied by almost unbearably beautiful paintings, emanating a portrait\u2019s reverence for reality and an icon\u2019s fidelity to the poetic truth beyond the material fact. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Nightingale by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Swan by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
House martin by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Greenfinch by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Sparrowhawk by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What David Whyte did for words<\/a>, Robert Macfarlane has done for birds; what Rachel Carson said of the sea \u2014 \u201cno one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry\u201d<\/a> \u2014 can be said, must be said of birds, and no one has drawn out their poetry more truthfully, more tenderly than Robert Macfarlane, his rhythmic incantations summoning the birds one by one, subject by subject, in all their fierce, fragile wonder: the gannet, \u201cgraceful and precise as an equation\u201d; the avocet, who \u201cseen at sunset in silhouette seems blown of glass \u2014 as if a breath of wind would leave her in shards amid the reeds\u201d; the bar-tailed godwit traversing six thousand miles between Alaska and Australia in \u201ca single, epic super-flight\u201d; the black-throated diver crying out his prehistoric \u201cfog-born ululation\u201d; the eider, who \u201ccan fly as fast as a cheetah can run\u201d on wings feathered with fibers so delicate that they \u201cmake angora feel dense as lead\u201d; the tawny owl, her eyes \u201cpure night, two twelve-bore barrels, a pair of shadow planets.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Tawny owl by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Punctuating these love letters to particular species are the seven wonders of the bird world \u2014 Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight, and Migration \u2014 each essayed into a revelation between the scientific and the spiritual. Pulsating through it all is a beckoning to see the world in a bird more clearly in order to love it more deeply:<\/p>\n

\n

Noticing is the first step to naming; knowing the first step to knowing both things and the relations between things. Knowledge may lead to wonder, wonder to care, care to action, action to change. But this is a fragile chain, easily broken \u2014 its links must be reforged and rejoined, over and over.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

How lucky we are that there are still those unresigned people \u2014 stubborn enough, loving enough \u2014 who keep reforging and rejoining the chain with links more beautiful, more durable than we could have imagined, lustrous with that indestructible sense of wonder in which lies our only salvation, in which resounds our most everlasting song. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Yellowhammer by Jackie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

donating = loving<\/h3>\n

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings<\/em><\/a> for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation<\/a>. Your support makes all the difference.<\/p>\n

\n

newsletter<\/h3>\n

The Marginalian<\/em> has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect<\/a>. Like? Sign up.<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSplit the Lark \u2014 and You\u2019ll find the Music, \u201d Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, \u201cNow, do you doubt that your Bird was true?\u201d In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the spirit of a creature \u2014 a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 13:04:27","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}