In so many ways, the story of birdsong study in Britain began with Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (there are many editions available – the 2014 edition from Little Toller has an introduction by James Lovelock and illustrations by Eric Ravilious). Richard Mabey’s 2006 biography of White (from Profile Books) fills in valuable context.
The bird impersonator Percy Edwards told his story in his memoir The Road I Travelled (Arthur Barker, 1979). It’s no longer in print, but second-hand copies aren’t hard to find.
You can find out more about the University of Aberdeen’s splendid Listening to Birds project – and delve into a rich repository of birdsong experience – at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/birdsong/about/.
Edward Grey’s The Charm of Birds has deservedly gone through dozens of reprints – my copy is a 1931 edition from Hodder & Stoughton, with woodcuts by Robert Gibbings. The Life of the Robin by David Lack – first published in 1943 – was reissued in 2016 by Pallas Athene, with a new introduction by David Lindo (‘the Urban Birder’), illustrations by Robert Gillmor and postscripts from biologist David Harper and Peter Lack, David’s son. And you can find out more about the nefarious and complicated cuckoo in Nick Davies’ Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature (Bloomsbury, 2015).
If you’re looking for an overview of birds in literature, Birds in Literature by Leonard Lutwack (University Press of Florida, 1994) fits the bill: wide-ranging, smart and insightful. The Poetry of Birds, a Viking anthology edited by Tim Dee and Simon Armitage, is a terrific treasury of bird-themed verse that includes many of the poems mentioned in this book (Hardy’s ‘The Blinded Bird’ and Wordsworth’s ‘To the Cuckoo’ among them).
John Bevis’s The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography (Uniformbooks, 2016) explores the work of the pioneering brothers with intelligence and verve. And Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow (I have the 1999 Penguin edition) is a vigorous defence of science in response to John Keats’s complaint that ‘all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy’.
In researching the history of how we’ve made scientific sense of birdsong, I was indebted to two weighty books: Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Montgomerie (Princeton University Press, 2014) and Nature’s Music: The Science of Birdsong (Elsevier Academic Press, 2004) by Peter Marler and Hans Slabbekoorn.
Born to Sing by Charles Hartshorne (I have the 1992 Indiana UP edition) and Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Birdsong by David Rothenberg (Basic Books, 2006) are both classics of birdsong writing. John Bevis (him again) packed an amazing amount of fascinating information into his book Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds (MIT Press, 2010).
Amy Clampitt’s ‘Syrinx’ is included in the 1999 Collected Poems from Penguin Random House. And the many works of H. Mortimer Batten may be found in fusty second-hand bookshops the length and breadth of England.
Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory is a magnificent exploration of what the First World War did to us, and how, in the years since, we have remembered and mythologised it. I first read it in the 1977 OUP paperback when I was a student, but I’d unhesitatingly recommend the 2009 illustrated version from Sterling.
George Seaver’s Edward Wilson, Nature Lover – his affectionate portrait of the great ornithologist, artist and Antarctic explorer – is out of print; Isobel Williams’ With Scott in the Antarctic: Edward Wilson (The History Press, 2008) is a more recent biography.
I was grateful to Penelope Vigar’s The Novels of Thomas Hardy: Illusion and Reality (Athlone Press, 1974) for her insights on birdsong in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and to Delia Da Sousa Correa’s chapter on song in Adam Bede in George Eliot in Context (Margaret Harris, ed.); Cambridge University Press, 2013).
The books of Bernie Krause are must-reads for anyone wishing to learn more about the under-studied field of natural acoustics. The Great Animal Orchestra (Profile, 2012) was my way in to Krause’s work.
You can read more about Dr Rupert Marshall’s research into corn-bunting dialects at: http://users.aber.ac.uk/rmm/cornbuntings.htm.
Elizabeth Eva Leach’s Sung Birds: Music, Nature & Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2007) is an absorbing and scholarly study of how, in the formative years of modern music, birdsong fitted into our ideas of what was and wasn’t musical.
Walter Garstang’s Songs of the Birds (1935) is good fun to read. Richard Jefferies described his song-filled wanderings near The Waffrons in The Hills and the Vale (1909); Landscape With Figures, a 2013 Penguin collection of Jefferies’ writings edited and introduced by Richard Mabey, is a great introduction to this multifaceted writer’s work.
Beatrice Harrison’s memoir The Cello and the Nightingales, published in 1985, presents the cellist as a dedicated musician and an engagingly dizzy writer (her editor, Patricia Cleveland-Peck, admitted to having to pare back Harrison’s ‘frequent superlatives and adjectives of endearment’).
You can read Alison Greggor’s wonderful ‘Why Can’t We Love Like an Albatross?’ at: http://kingsreview.co.uk/articles/why-cant-we-love-like-an-albatross/.
Mark Cocker’s Birds Britannica (with Richard Mabey; Chatto & Windus, 2005) – for my money, one of the finest bird books ever put together – provided me with terrific material on the culture of chaffinch competition. So too did the work of James Greenwood, ‘the Amateur Casual’: there are editions of his 1874 book In Strange Company out there, but I discovered his work through Lee Jackson’s superb Victorian London website: http://www.victorianlondon.org/.
The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, composer Sarah Angliss’s 2011 documentary for BBC Radio 4, takes a hugely entertaining and informative look at the training of caged songbirds; at the time of writing it was still available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0128pyp (it includes the endearing titbit that ornithologist Geoff Sample whistles the opening riff of Arthur Conley’s ‘Sweet Soul Music’ to the blackbirds in his garden).
Frances Burney’s Camilla, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey are all available in the Oxford World’s Classics series.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in 1962 and is rightly remembered not only as a classic work of conservation writing but as a major turning-point in the history of the environmental movement. In 2012, the British wildlife writer Conor Mark Jameson produced a follow-up, Silent Spring Revisited (Bloomsbury), which offers an up-to-date take on the same troubling subject; Bridget Stutchbury’s excellent Silence of the Songbirds (Walker Books, 2007) tackles the question from a US perspective. Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (Jonathan Cape, 2014) needs no introduction from me.
And both series of Detectorists are available to buy on DVD or via download from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06l51nr/products.