Further Field Notes from a Small Planet

A Claxton Diary

Another beautiful, revelatory country diary from one of the best nature writers in Britain.

A spellbinding nature diary that’s up there with the greatest… [Cocker] regularly follows up a beady description with a wild, glorious overview, followed by an astonishing fact or two… Hurrah for Mark Cocker! *****

Being a naturalist, Cocker’s great strength is in the breadth of his senses: his essays seem to cover almost everything he has seen, heard or smelled in the land around his home. He writes clearly, and with a style that has a ring of poetry about it without being pretentious or precious… Spending time with his acutely observant essays will convince many readers that the Great Barrier Reef and vast jungles of Africa can be understood best only by first understanding the startling drama, diversity and complicated natural dynamics of a humble corner of Britain.

If you’ve never read Mark Cocker, then you must. His style is sharp, selfless, and wonderfully evocative, his knowledge deep and wide-ranging but lightly borne, his curiosity joyful and infectious.

If you can’t get out to enjoy the spring weather, immerse yourself in the natural world with Mark Cocker… his writing transports you there.

If you already know Mark Cocker’s work, you’ll need no persuading to buy this – if you don’t, treat yourself to a very fine collection of nature essays.

A Claxton Diary is a collection of his finest essays written on wildlife and encounters with nature.

[Cocker] has a dream-like poetic edge, a touch of surreality that tips over into gentle humour… Cocker’s gift is that he can make you look – as he does – at blackbirds in a new way, or, shifting to the micro-scale, at ants bustling about in the cracks between paving slabs.

A master of short-form writing… Cocker combines forensic observation of minutiae with grander universal truths… Exquisite essential reading.

Mark Cocker is one of the many modern nature writers who I admire... and his latest book, A Claxton Diary, is as well written as all his others.

Mark Cocker is an author and naturalist whose thirteen books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. His book Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and won the New Angle Prize for Literature in 2009. With the photographer David Tipling he published Birds and People in 2013, a massive survey described by the Times Literary Supplement as 'a major literary event as well as an ornithological one.' Our Place: Can We Save Britain's Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? was described by the Sunday Times as 'impassioned, expert and always beautifully written ... a sobering and magnificent work.' His most recent book, A Claxton Diary, won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2019.

Another beautiful, revelatory country diary from one of the best nature writers in Britain. 
 
'If you’ve never read Mark Cocker, then you must. His style is sharp, selfless, and wonderfully evocative, his knowledge deep and wide-ranging but lightly borne, his curiosity joyful and infectious.' Mail On Sunday, Books of the Year 
 
For seventeen years, as part of his daily writerly routine, the author and naturalist Mark Cocker has taken a two-mile walk down to the river from his cottage on the edge of the Norfolk Broads National Park. Over the course of those 10,000 daily paces he has learnt the art of patience to observe a butterfly, a bird, flower, bee, deer, otter or fly and to take pleasure in all the other inhabitants of his parish, no matter how seemingly insignificant. 
 
In turn these encounters have then been converted into literary epiphanies that are now a widely celebrated part of his work. In A Claxton Diary he has gathered some of the finest short essays that he has ever written on wildlife. They range over almost everything he can see, touch or smell, from the minute to the cosmic, from a strange micromoth called yellow-barred longhorn to that fiercest of winter storms the so-called ‘Beast from the East’. 
 
From the marvellous to the macabre, Cocker tries to capture nature without flinching and in its entirety. In so doing he provides us with a vision of an English country parish that for intimacy and precise detail is comparable with Gilbert White’s diary on Selbourne. Above all he reminds us that we are all just members of one miraculous family, fashioned from sunlight and the dust from old stars.

Birds Britannica

Now in its second edition with a new introduction by Helen Macdonald, a unique, beautiful, comprehensive cultural and social study, species by species, of all the birds in Britain. A companion volume to Flora Britannica and Bugs Britannica

Birds are inextricably entwined with British life 
 
British customs, more than 1,000 years of English literature and even the landscape itself, have all been enhanced by the presence of birds. This superb book pays tribute to the remarkable relationship forged between a nation and its most treasured national heritage. Birds Britannica concentrates on our social history and on the cultural links between humans and birds. 
 
What makes Birds Britannica special is the inclusion of observations and experiences from more than 1,000 naturalists and bird lovers. These contributions from the public touch on avian ecology; the lore and language of birds; their myths, the art and literature they have inspired; birds as food; and the crucial role they play in our sense of place and the changing seasons. 
 
No other book has dealt so completely with the rich connections between birds and humans; Birds Britannica captures the very essence of that relationship and explores why birds matter and why we care. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HELEN MACDONALD, SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF H IS FOR HAWK

The British love their birds, which are inextricably entwined with every aspect of their island life. British customs, more than 1,000 years of English literature, the very fabric of society, even the landscape itself, have all been enhanced by the presence of birds. Highly acclaimed on first publication, this superb book pays tribute to the remarkable relationship forged between a nation and its most treasured national heritage. 
 
Birds Britannica is a unique publication of immense importance. Neither an identification guide nor a behavioural study (although both these subjects enter its field), it concentrates on our social history and on the cultural links between humans and birds. 
 
What makes Birds Britannica of special significance is the inclusion of observations and experiences from more than 1,000 naturalists and bird lovers. These contributions from the public touch on avian ecology; the lore and language of birds; their myths, the art and literature they have inspired; birds as food; and the crucial role they play in our sense of place and the changing seasons. 
 
Birds Britannica took eight years to research and was assembled by a team that included some of the finest writers and image-makers of British wildlife. On one level, it is a remarkable collection of humorous stories, field observations and tales of joy, wonder and occasional woe; on another, it is a nationwide chronicle. Scholarly and wide-ranging, a mix of the traditional and the contemporary, Birds Britannica is a comprehensive record of birdlife in the early years of the twenty-first century. No other book has dealt so completely with the rich connections between birds and humans; Birds Britannica captures the very essence of that relationship, and explores why birds matter and why we care.

Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too Late?

Our Place

A radical examination of Britain's relationship with the land, by one of our greatest nature writers.

Essential reading for anybody who cares about the future.

A seriously great book, important and urgent… As soon as I finished Our Place, I packaged up my copy and sent it off to Michael Gove… this is the kind of book that demands action.

Best known as one of our foremost nature writers, Mark Cocker spent several years researching this tour de force… stuffed with eye-opening statistics… by turns hopeful, melancholy and humorous… [Our Place] is heartfelt.

Thunderingly necessary… Cocker on this kind of form – eloquent, practical, dogged and wise – is the sort of dynamic chivvying force [conservation] will always need… the book he’s written – however measured, equable and intelligent – is a call for revolution.

Impassioned, expert and always beautifully written… Our Place is a sobering and magnificent work.

It is easy to be angry about environmental destruction; easy to demand change without hope but in this potent, elegant and influencing telling of the story of what we have done to England's wildlife, Mark Cocker archives something more: a reasoned tone in a radical cause. If you care about our country, read it.

What a relief it is to have this subject explored without the usual diatribes and righteous hysteria. Cocker’s quiet tone carries great authority and… [Our Place] deserves to command respect and wide attention.

A fierce polemic by an eminent ornithologist about Britain’s denuded natural habitat.

Fascinating… Our Place is a brave book... It will undoubtedly ruffle what few figurative feathers we have left.

A new book by Mark Cocker is a major event, and [Our Place] is no exception… Cocker has always been brilliant at considering our relationship with nature… You can come away from it feeling that something can be done, that we can save Britain’s wildlife, if only there is the will to turn well-meaning generalities into action. The clock is ticking.

A superb new book by the naturalist Mark Cocker that is fast becoming highly influential… The environment secretary is telling friends he found it ‘powerfully persuasive’.

I kept thinking of the raw power of Mark Cocker’s astonishing Our Place, which was brilliant because it was so particular and familiar in the natural world it anatomised.

An artful mix of lyrical writing and assured analysis that amounts to a quiet manifesto for action.

More urgent than any of Cocker’s previous writing… This resourceful and eloquent book could prove to be important.

This is the best book on the state of nature since George Monbiot’s Feral and deserves to be read just as widely… a very good read.

This book contains some exquisite writing about nature, but it is always powerfully and insistently ground in “its cause” … A radical polemic in the tradition of Hazlitt and Cobbett

A new book by Mark Cocker is a major event and his latest is a work of sweeping ambition

Important… ambitious… [Cocker] is a superb writer

A compelling history of nature conservation and why it matters, it is worth your time

Our Place… is a work of serious and sustained advocacy – passionate and committed… elements are fused in the writing, along with many apparent digressions and asides, in a way that gives the book a richly textured feel… the argument advances on several fronts simultaneously and in more than one dimension, in a complex literary ecology matching his subject.

Mark Cocker… writes with superb understanding

A lyrical and intensely personal account… an excellent and important book… a wake-up call to us all.

Birdwatch, **Birders' Choice Awards 2018, Book of the Year**

'Essential reading for anybody who cares about the future’ Henry Marsh, *New Statesman Books of the Year* 
 
A radical examination of Britain's relationship with the land by one of our greatest nature writers. 
 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT GOLDEN BEER BOOK PRIZE 2019** 
 
The British love their countryside more than almost any other nation, yet they live in one of the most denatured landscapes on Earth. From the flatlands of Norfolk to the tundra-like expanse of the Flow Country in northern Scotland, Mark Cocker sets out on a personal quest through the British countryside attempting to solve this puzzle. Radical, provocative and original, Our Place tackles some of the central issues of our time whilst mapping out a future in which this overcrowded island of ours could be a place fit not just for human occupants but also for its billions of wild citizens. 
 
‘A tour de force… By turns hopeful, melancholy, humorous and heartfelt’ BBC Wildlife Book of the Month

Field Notes from a Small Planet

Claxton

After the massive, world-spanning, unanimously acclaimed Birds and People Mark Cocker looks in fascinating detail at his home parish in Norfolk and its wildlife

After Mark Cocker’s glorious book, you will never look at a blackberry bush the same way again.

A nature journal full of beautiful, delicate observation

A beautifully-written account of one man’s passion for the natural world

If your eye has ever been caught by a moth, owl, jay or ash tree, Claxton has something new to tell about it, about Britain, and about life – which is an infinite compilation of exquisite detail.

To be astonished by nature, look no further than Claxton.

Cocker’s profound knowledge, uncanny ability to observe and heartliftingly exact prose make Claxton one of those books that transforms the way you see your own home parish.

The book is spectacular… Brilliant natural-history writing.

At once charming and unsentimental, these short pieces educate and delight.

Cocker is a sharp-eyed, knowledgeable and accessible writer… Makes one  look again at the world outdoors with renewed awe and wonder.

[Cocker] is enraptured, passionate and down-to-earth, and never stops wanting to learn and delve deeper into his ordinary, extraordinary English countryside.

Cocker is a sharp-eyed, knowledgeable and accessible writer. The way in which he celebrates the rhythms of a year makes one look again at the world outdoors with renewed awe and wonder.

[Cocker] observes with patience, acuity and in prose so exquisite it borders on poetry… You feel as though you’re by the side of the most expert guide you could hope for, being taught to marvel at wonders of nature.

He writes both robustly and exquisitely, seeing into things through the prism of language with great craft and a sense of seamless ease.

A heartfelt plea to treasure and protect the diversity and richness of our indigenous wildlife.

It’s a celebration of wonder that lies in our everyday experiences, with magical and concise, but inspiring writing!

[Cocker’s] writing is characterised by close observation and a tangible sense of the progression through the seasons.

His year-long cycle of daily writings from a single valley in Norfolk proves the infinite variety to be found in a confined space.

Cocker has produced a nature journal full of beautiful, delicate observation, intense drama and new understanding… Claxton is a book full of tastes, sounds and smells as well as sights.

An immensely satisfying and calming read, this can be savoured and enjoyed.

A cycle of jewelled, profoundly knowledgeable essays by one of our three finest contemporary nature writers.

Cocker poses straight questions about our relationship with the natural world and whose job it is to protect is. This skilfully written, lyrically observer book will make you feel it’s a worthwhile job.

If you want an antidote to the season, as one year turns coldly into the next, this book is perfect.

I defy anyone not to be moved by some of his more remarkable encounters with an amazing cast of creatures and his profound love for his landscape.

A lyrical writer, Cocker lucidly conveys his knowledge and love of nature’s details that most of us fail to observe.

Reading this book is a great enjoyment in itself, but also helps elucidate why the world outside is so very important to our inner selves.

Cocker writes with such infectious enthusiasm that blackberry picking becomes a thrilling pursuit

Sparklingly tight prose … a delight to read

Like the best nature books, Cocker’s will infect readers with enthusiasm for going out and noticing things

It’s as satisfyingly poetic as it is poetically satisfying.

'After Mark Cocker’s glorious book, you will never look at a blackberry bush the same way again.' 
Philip Hoare, New Statesman 
 
In 2001 Mark Cocker moved to Claxton, a small village in Norfolk. In a series of daily writings spanning the course of a year he explores his relationship to the landscape he lives in, to nature and to all the living things around him - the birds, plants, trees, mammals, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, bush crickets, grasshoppers, ants and bumblebees. Passionate, astonishing and inspiring, this book is a celebration of the wonder that lies in our everyday experience. 
 
Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Biology Book Award, the Jarrold East Anglian Book Awards, the New Angle Prize and theThwaites Wainwright Prize

Selected Writings on Nature

A Tiger in the Sand

A rich and wide-ranging collection of pieces by Mark Cocker, the author of Birds Britannica and one of Britain's very best writers on nature.

In seven works of non-fiction, especially in Birders and the universally acclaimed Birds Britannica, Mark Cocker has established himself as one of the foremost writers on nature and wilderness. In his most lyrical work to date, he has drawn together the best of his writing on wildlife, mainly taken from columns for the Guardian and Guardian Weekly. 
 
These carefully distilled articles, over a hundred in all, illustrate some of his most enduring themes over the last twenty years - the magical dynamism of birds, as well as the subtle beauty, vast skies and wildlife riches of the Norfolk landscape. In its celebration of the natural world, the hugely varied selection also demonstrates a concern to champion the despised and neglected - rats, gulls, crows (the 'Black Beasts' of his first section) - as much as it explores some of the most charismatic creatures on Earth - penguins, whales, lions and elephants. Cocker is equally good at evoking the commonplace mysteries of garden blackbirds and thrush's song, as he is the exotic otherness of mountain gorillas or the one-horned rhinoceros. 
 
With its attention to detail, especially the sharpness of perception and the precise use of language, the writing in A Tiger in the Sand shows qualities more usually associated with poetry than with prose.

Crow Country

Mark Cocker's brilliant description of his journeys in search of rooks, crows and ravens, birds that obsessed him and changed his life for ever

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. 
 
One Midsummer's Day by Mark Cocker coming in June 2023.

Luminously beautiful and dartingly intelligent, Cocker's obsessive quest after the ancient trails of rooks across our dusk skies leads to an almost sacred space: a place where the landscape of the imagination and the lovingly, minutely observed realities of the natural world come to roost together

Guaranteed to ensure that you never look at a crow in quite the same way again

Fabulous... Like all classic works of natural history, is is an extraordinary revelation of riches and wonders and that lie at our doorsteps, completely ignored

A splendid book...Crow Country's narrative of rookish discovery unfolds with splendid variety, incorporating scientific exposition, biography, environmental history, poetry, memoir and biography... Your heart beats faster as he describes a pack of tight-packed wigeon flushing in fear from an icy creak. You feel the shock of recognition as a barn owl meets his gaze. It's infectiously emotional. At it's most lyrical Crow Country matches the heights of that deeply eerie work of avian obsession JA Baker's The Peregrine; yet at its most scientific, it could sit alongside the best ornithological monographs... Crow Country is a significant, beautiful work

Exquisitely written, passionate exploration of the local and commonplace

Cocker's gift is to draw you into his hobby so deftly that you quickly begin to share his every enthusiasm

Cocker is a beautiful writer...the twilight and his beloved rooks bring out the poet in him...a loving observation of the wonders on the wing in everyday England

The nation's most observant and intuitive of nature writers

As obsessive a celebration of rook and jackdaw - and of human immersion in nature - as anyone could wish

A vivid example of the "new nature writing" it is a lyrical and intense evocation of the world of jackdaws and rook, and an elegy on watchfulness

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.

Birders

The story of an obsession, and of the people who share it, by one of Britain's leading birdwatchers.

At last!  An up to date examination of what makes birders tick.  And about time too!  Wonderfully written

A natural history version of Fever Pitch... Reading it may even make you want to try out this strangely addictive past time for yourself

Intensely readable, very funny and highly enlightening

With a mixture of well-chosen anecdotes and self-deprecating humour, Cocker succeeds in making event he most hardened cynic appreciate his passion. Birders is a stylish work in a long tradition of fine writing on the subject

The best account yet of the "tribe" and its wonderful, unworldly passions

Since 1972 Mark Cocker has been a member of a community of obsessional people, almost all male, who sacrifice most of their spare time, a good deal of money, sometimes their chances of a partner or family, even occasionally their lives, to watch birds. 
 
Birders is the story of this community, of its characters, its rules, its equipment and its adventures - many of which are hilariously funny, Birders is also a work of love - the story of what birds can do to the human heart.

Mark Cocker

Lyrical and startling by turn, he reveals the extraordinary in the apparently ordinary... A jewel of a book

Not just a glorious celebration of swifts but of their place amid the panoply of life on Earth... Cocker is one of our greatest living naturalists... He brings to this vast subject a scientist's rigour and a poet's expansive vision

A beautiful, brilliant, mind-stretching and soul-flying book. Genius

Horatio Clare, author of A Single Swallow

His grandest effort yet. Told as a series of reflections that fly through his mind in the course of a single day watching swifts from his garden in Norfolk, he ranges across topics as widely as a swift ranges across the sky... Magnificent

Cocker is both a superb prose stylist, with a poet’s eye and ear, and a naturalist of wide erudition and imaginative reach… One Midsummer’s Day is a wonderful book – literally, a book of wonders.

A rich and elegant exploration that takes us to unexpected places. With the swift as our lift, we leave the garden on an extraordinary tour that takes in the moon, amongst many other wonderful destinations

Tristan Gooley, author of How to Read a Tree

Mark Cocker's ode to a remarkable species makes a powerful case for the value of awe in a time of ecological grief

In his mission to restore a sense of wonder to life's small and ordinary things, Mark Cocker takes us on a soaring journey from the Cretaceous period to a summer's day in his English garden... Lyrical, grand and full of reverence

Cocker brings both nostalgia and universal connections to the swifts' majestic, sky-high adventures

A stunning celebration – and commemoration – of swifts

It's not often I am moved to tears. I wish you could reprint the last chapter of One Midsummer's Day as a free-standing essay and give it out to every schoolchild in the country

An outright classic of his genre... If you thrill to the swifts' arrival (and mourn their annual too-soon departure), this book will enchant as they do... A nature classic for the new century

A thoughtful combination of the personal and the ornithological

Mark Cocker has achieved something extraordinary. Crafted from a lifetime of watching and adoring nature, he presents to us the whole universe, reflected in the dark eye of a sleek brown bird. At once intimate and expansive, this book is a lovesong to swifts, a paean to nature and a call to protect our unique and fragile planet

A passionately written study of these mysterious "creatures of air", fascinating and constantly thought-provoking

I loved this book. Reading it, I realised I needed this book. I felt awe, at the story Mark Cocker tells and the ambition in telling it. He pulls it off and has created a masterpiece unlike anything else - a gentle deep-time joyride, a paean to a small black bird and to all of existence. Literally wonder-full

Tom Mustill, author of How to Speak Whale

As thoroughly researched and elegantly written as one would expect from Mark Cocker, one of the leading nature writers of our time. More than just an account of a species of bird, remarkable though that bird is, Cocker goes much further to show how the life of swifts is deeply entangled with the entirety of life on Earth

Peter Reason, author of In Search of Grace

Situates both swifts and humans in the universe in a way that I've not seen done for any species... A beautifully poised book

A wonderful book that weaves half a century of natural history expertise around a vanishing bird. Informative, personal, universal and thrilling

Roger Morgan-Grenville, author of Across a Waking Land

If like me you love swifts, this one is for you, but its scope and appeal takes in a far wider range of summer wildlife, too

A book of ambition, intellect and compassion

A delightful book that is packed full of facts, emotion, beautiful prose, and hard-hitting messages

Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth

It takes a whole universe to make one small black bird 
 
The bestselling author of Crow Country and writer of The Guardian's Country Diary tells the story of all life on Earth through a single day spent in the company of swifts. 
 
'A jewel of a book' Caroline Lucas MP 
 
Swifts are among the most extraordinary of all birds. Their migrations span continents and their twelve-week stopover, when they pause to breed in European rooftops, is the very definition of summer. They may nest in our homes but much about their lives passes over our heads. No birds are more wreathed in mystery. Captivated, Mark Cocker sets out to capture their essence. 
 
Over the course of one day in midsummer he devotes himself to his beloved black birds as they spiral overhead. Yet this is also a book about so much more. Swifts are a prism through which Cocker explores the profound interconnections of the whole biosphere. 
 
From the deep-sea thermal vents where life was born to the 15 million degrees at the core of our Sun, he shows that life is a singular and glorious continuum. These birds without borders are a perfect symbol to express the unity of the living planet. But they also illuminate how no creature, least of all ourselves, can be said to be alive in isolation. We are all inextricably connected. 
 
Drawing deeply on science, history, literature and a lifetime of close observation, One Midsummer's Day is a dazzling and wide-ranging celebration of all life on Earth by one of our greatest nature writers. 
 
'A nature classic for the new century' Jim Perrin, author of Snowdon

Mark Cocker

Praise for One Midsummer's Day

Lyrical and startling by turn, he reveals the extraordinary in the apparently ordinary... A jewel of a book

Not just a glorious celebration of swifts but of their place amid the panoply of life on Earth... Cocker is one of our greatest living naturalists... He brings to this vast subject a scientist's rigour and a ...

A beautiful, brilliant, mind-stretching and soul-flying book. Genius

Lyrical and startling by turn, he reveals the extraordinary in the apparently ordinary... A jewel of a book

Not just a glorious celebration of swifts but of their place amid the panoply of life on Earth... Cocker is one of our greatest living naturalists... He brings to this vast subject a scientist's rigour and a ...

A beautiful, brilliant, mind-stretching and soul-flying book. Genius

Lyrical and startling by turn, he reveals the extraordinary in the apparently ordinary... A jewel of a book

Not just a glorious celebration of swifts but of their place amid the panoply of life on Earth... Cocker is one of our greatest living naturalists... He brings to this vast subject a scientist's rigour and a ...

A beautiful, brilliant, mind-stretching and soul-flying book. Genius

Books by Mark Cocker

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