An anthology is a wondrous thing. It is the kind of book that almost compels the reader to keep dipping into its contents, as varied as an assortment of confectionery. And this book is a little treasure. Not only is it a hardback volume small enough to slip into a fairly capacious pocket, but it is published by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, and the poetry and prose contents are accompanied by Eric Fitch Daglish’s superb woodcuts.

Mitchell has chosen wonderful excerpts of poems and prose, all to do with birds. The chapters range from definitions of birds to the four seasons of the year and what is observed by birdwatchers. There are chapters on birds of the inland, as well as those of what she calls the ‘outland’, being river, coast, sea and shore; others on birds in flight, hawks and eagles, and even birds and us.

There are more than a thousand years of narratives by 142 writers recorded, starting with a description of birds from Aristotle in 350 BCE, and Ovid’s description of a pet parrot, also in that BCE period. The great names of birdwatching and description such as Dorothy Wordsworth and John James Audubon join those of John Keats, Pliny the Elder, D H Lawrence, Theodore Roosevelt, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, George Orwell, Emily and Charlotte Bronte and David Livingstone.

Mitchell has obviously taken enormous trouble to research the writings of people such as Barbara Kingsolver, Henry David Thoreau, William Butler Yeats, George Eliot, Jonathan Franzen, Sir Francis Drake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin and even Kenneth Grahame, for inclusion in the anthology. While she lets them do the talking, she notes in her introduction that this is a time of crisis in the natural world, with bird life threatened, along with our own.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville