Crow Country

Rooks and jackdaws are both members of the same bird family. To ornithologists the group is known as the corvids, to the layperson they are ‘crows’. But to Mark Cocker these two species have become a fixation and a way of life. When he moved with his family to a rundown cottage in the Norfolk Broads he acquired first a naturalist's perfect home in the countryside, then the keys to a secret landscape. Twice a day flight-lines of rooks and jackdaws pass over the house on their way to a roost in the Yare Valley. Following them down to the river one winter's night, Cocker discovered a roiling, deafening flock of birds which rises at its peak to 40,000. From the moment he watched the flock, these gloriously commonplace birds were unsheathed entirely from their ordinariness. Step by step he pieces together the complexities of the birds' inner lives, the historical depth of the British relationship with the rook and the unforeseen richness hidden in that sombre voice, a raucous crow song that he calls 'our landscape made audible'. Crow Country is a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing.