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.

Birders

Science & Math

Mark Cocker

Biological Sciences

Vintage/Ebury (a Division of R

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.

Crow Country: A Meditation on Birds, Landscape and Nature

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Vintage Books USA

In a little more than 400 years a handful of small, highly advanced nation states at the western extremity of the Eurasian continent brought within their political orbit most of the diverse peoples of four continents. The story of how they did so is a tale of extraordinary human achievement in adversity, but also a tragedy involving the slaughter of millions and the extinction of numerous distinct peoples. This book focuses in detail on four episodes: the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the Andean empire of the Inca, the British decimation of the Tasmanian Aborigines, the Euro-American dispossession of the Apache, and the German subjugation of the Herero and Nama of south-west Africa. These four narratives describe the process by which native tribal people were defeated and in some cases exterminated, the intellectual and moral rationale of the conquerors, and the often extraordinary heroism of the conquered.

Rivers of blood, rivers of gold: Europe's conflict with tribal peoples

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Good, Very good copy, clean and sound; apparently unread 216 p. : map ; 24 cm.. . Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-216).. .

In Crow Country

JONATHAN CAPE.

BRAND NEW, Exactly same ISBN as listed, Please double check ISBN carefully before ordering.

OUR PLACE

London: Jonathan Cape, 2018

A mixture of biography, history and literary criticism, this is a study of travel, and of the concept of travel itself, and focuses on seven travellers, analyzing the relationship between their lives and their works. This book also addresses the idea of a journey as a quest or spiritual pilgrimage.

Loneliness and Time

Travel

Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Another beautiful, revelatory country diary from one of the best nature writers in Britain.\n'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\nFor 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.\nIn 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’.\nFrom 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.

Claxton Diary

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

Vintage

One Midsummer's Day

Crow Country The Birds & The Bees

Nature & Ecology

It takes a whole universe to make one small black bird 
The story of all life on Earth, told through a single day spent in the company of swifts.\nSwifts 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.\nOver 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.\nFrom 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.\nDrawing 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.

One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth

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Books by Mark Cocker