This book’s subtitle, Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth, is the first clue to its ambition. In his mission to restore a sense of wonder to life’s small and ordinary things, Mark Cocker – author of the award-winning Crow Country – takes us on a soaring journey from the Cretaceous period to a summer’s day in his English garden, via angiosperms, bacteria, flying ant day, Ted Hughes and the magnetic field caused by our planet’s iron core – “the Earth’s innermost soul” – to demonstrate the essential interconnectedness of everything. Like the birds he tracks as they skirl and scream above his home, the book covers a great distance, and not always in a straight line. It is not easy to express awe in writing without flipping into hyperbole or cliche, but in his promise to express “how it takes a whole universe to make just the one small black bird”, Cocker aims high.
In an explanatory note, he says: “This is not strictly a book of science but the hybrid form that is conventionally associated with the term ‘nature writing’.” It is certainly scientifically rigorous – packed with copious footnotes, end notes and references to a glossary – and the bare facts it lays out are extraordinary. Swifts have been recorded at altitudes of 4,400m, and travel so far in a single trip that a nesting pair feeding their chicks in southern England could be scooping up insects above Germany. They weigh just 40g but have a wingspan of 42-49cm; a human would need arms 800 metres long to match the weight to width ratio. But it is also lyrical, grand and full of reverence. “You could say that the sounds of the birds, burning over our house amid their contrails of scream, are a part of the song of the Earth turning in outer space,” Cocker writes.
