Crow Country: A Meditation on Birds, Landscape and Nature
by Mark Cocker 216pp, Cape, £16.99
The Brits have always loved birds, but rarely so much or so obviously as now. Several newspapers - including this one - have recently published handy identification charts; an amateur guide has appeared in the bestseller lists; TV twitchers have taken to promoting seasonal garden watches; the RSPB is flourishing. Why the sudden surge of interest? It's partly a response to our increasingly urbanised lives: wings over a city, let alone across the countryside, remind us of ancient freedoms and connections. And it's partly a proof of larger anxieties about the environment as a whole. Wherever we train our binoculars, our focus is sharpened by a melancholy sense of foreboding. If even that most commonplace small brown one - the sparrow - is disappearing from some areas, what does that mean for blackbirds and thrushes, wrens and robins? What familiar emblems of home will we be left with?
Crows, probably: they have always been great survivors. But crows have never inspired the same easy affection as most other birds. Farmers have regard them as a menace, shooting them and nailing their bodies to barn doors, or ransacking bottom drawers to make scarecrows. Professional ornithologists - with a few honourable exceptions - have preferred to concentrate on rarer or more beautiful species. Amateurs have swivelled away with faint shudders of revulsion: crows, after all, are faintly disgusting creatures, with their pickaxe beaks and big, scrawny feet. No matter how often we see them harmlessly bouncing across open pasture or ragging through breezy skies, in our mind's eye we associate them with the aftermath of battles. We imagine them tearing at flesh and uttering harsh cries of predatory triumph.
It's a sign of the times, and also of his eloquence as a naturalist, that Mark Cocker is able to overcome these prejudices and get his new book airborne. Writing with the same sort of passion that propels J A Baker's great serenade The Peregrine (1967), he makes a ubiquitous bird seem special. His prose may not reach the same heights as Baker's rapturous ascents, his sense of communion may not measure the same devastating weight of mortality, but his ability to convey the power of an obsession is just as great, and his eye is as bright.
Cocker is also more of a scientist than Baker - more expert and more simply informative. This is just as well, since although crows are widespread they are mightily misunderstood, often to the extent of being confused with rooks and other corvids. (The easiest way to distinguish crows from rooks at a distance is to count their numbers: a crow "passes its life as one of a pair isolated from neighbours by a fierce territoriality . . . Rooks, by contrast, live, feed, sleep, fly, display, roost, fall sick and die in the presence of their own kind". Hence the old East Anglian adage "When tha's a rook, tha's a crow; and when tha's crows, tha's rooks".)
Cocker's title suggests a narrow beam of attention. In fact his book has interesting things to say about all seven breeding representatives of the corvid family that exist in Britain, and celebrates rooks in particular. His opening chapter lets us understand why. Watching "a long ellipse" of several thousand rooks and jackdaws head for their evening roost, he is lifted into ecstatic delight - entranced not just by the mass of the birds themselves, but by their power to "act like ink-blot tests drawing images out of [his] unconscious". In other words, the flocks plunge him deeply into himself while seeming marvellously other than himself, compelling him to ask questions about how language can contain a sight so amazing, and also to wonder how the birds articulate elements in his deep un- or sub-conscious.
This response, which is at once personal and generic, forms the foundation of everything that follows: Crow Country is a slice of autobiography, as well as a bird book. Once the opening roost-scene has settled into a cacophonous dusk, Cocker turns to look at his own recent past, describing how he and his family moved from inner-city Norwich to make a home in the flat country of the nearby Yare valley. The change is presented as an act of migration which is at once bird-like (because it is driven by instinct) and falteringly human (because the new house, at least to start with, leaves him feeling disoriented). As he begins to acclimatise, he finds that rook-watching charges "many of the things I had once overlooked or taken for granted . . . with fresh power and importance". The birds, he says, are "at the heart of my relationship with the Yare . . . my route into the landscape and my rationale for its exploration".
At first it seems that Cocker will use this sense of induction as the launch-pad for a strictly systematic account of the place and its birds. His opening chapters contain necessary facts about identification and habitat, they provide descriptions of "special encounters" which reinforce his belief that "natural history can serve as a metaphor for life itself", and they give accurate "reckonings" of numbers and behaviour patterns. They also summarise the main features of his watery and elusive landscape - the strange separations created by the river that bisects it, and the trees of Buckenham Carrs where his rooks congregate.
But as his book develops, it refuses to fly as its subject is supposed to do - in a straight line - preferring to ride on thermals of enthusiasm. One moment he is darting off to Dumfriesshire to search for one of the largest roosts recorded in these islands, the next he is back by the Yare ruminating on the associations of the birds' calls, the next he is pondering the significance of crows' "weddings" and "parliaments", the next he is brooding on "the dynamic relationship between rookery and roost". There would be a danger of these wanderings becoming confusing, were it not for the fact that they all partake of the same spirit of passionate inquiry. Cocker wants to map the "where" of his birds (and in so doing adds significantly to our understanding of the natural history of the region) and also to comprehend the "why". Why do rooks gather together? Is it for shelter, for the sharing of information? How do they understand the notion of family?
Cocker is as good a naturalist as he is prose-poet - which means Crow Country has authority as well as charm. It is also a kind of echo chamber, full of references to previous rook-fanciers whose observations blend with his own, creating a sense of "deep vistas" that open into a "vanished past". He quotes Thomas Browne and Andrew Young, John Clare and Edward Thomas - a small anthology, in fact, of kindred spirits. Puzzlingly, there's no mention of Ted Hughes, whose Crow poems feed so greedily - and famously - on the violent mythic associations of the birds. Did Cocker feel that to mention Hughes (to whom he refers admiringly in Birds Britannica) would be to undermine his efforts to rehabilitate crows? Possibly - but the omission is a pity. Crows may be a great deal smarter than most people think, and more likeably fascinating, but there's no denying that their claim on our interest has a great deal to do with what is opportunistic and ominous about them. Hughes realised this, and the force of his poems depends on it. Cocker's corvids are more nearly amiable; the beauty of their wheelings and flockings might take him out of himself, but at the end of each day they reliably lead him home.
· Andrew Motion is poet laureate. His memoir In the Blood is published in paperback by Faber. To order Crow Country for £15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.