Forty-nine British birds, every one of them in decline, from avocet to yellowhammer. Macfarlane writes each as a short essay rather than an identification entry — habits, flight, song, myth, and threat — and he varies the form wildly, including a moorhen chapter written as a dating profile. Jackie Morris paints them from life in watercolor and gold leaf. The frame is a great thinning of the skies, with roughly half of bird species declining worldwide and every spring quieter than the last, and the whole argument of the book is that we won’t save what we don’t love.
The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss