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This page lists books written by Mark Cocker. The books are ordered chronologically with the most recent at the top.

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Books by Mark Cocker

Books that include a contribution by Mark Cocker

Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet

Mark Cocker

Jonathan Cape

2014

"In a single twelve-month cycle of daily writings Mark Cocker explores his relationship to the East Anglian landscape, to nature and to all the living things around him. The separate entries are characterised by close observation, depth of experience, and a profound awareness of seasonal change, both within in each distinct year and, more alarmingly, over the longer period, as a result of the changing climate. The writing is concise, magical, inspiring.

Cocker describes all the wildlife in the village – not just birds, but plants, trees, mammals, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, bush crickets, grasshoppers, ants and bumblebees. The book explores how these other species are as essential to our sense of genuine well-being and to our feelings of rootedness as any other kind of fellowship.

A celebration of the wonder that lies in our everyday experience, Cocker’s book emphasises how Claxton is as much a state of mind as it is a place. Above all else, it is a manifesto for the central importance of the local in all human activity."

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Birds and People

Mark Cocker

Jonathan Cape

2013

"There are 10,500 species of bird worldwide and wherever they occur people marvel at their glorious colours and their beautiful songs. We also trap and consume birds of every kind. Yet birds have not just been good to eat. Their feathers, which keep us warm or adorn our costumes, give birds unique mastery over the heavens. Throughout history their flight has inspired the human imagination so that birds are embedded in our religions, folklore, music and arts. Vast in both scope and scale, Birds and People explores and celebrates this relationship and draws upon Mark Cocker's 40 years of observing and thinking about birds. Part natural history and part cultural study, it describes and maps the entire spectrum of our engagements with birds, drawing in themes of history, literature, art, cuisine, language, lore, politics and the environment. In the end, this is a book as much about us as it is about birds. Birds and People has been stunningly illustrated by one of Europe's best wildlife photographers, David Tipling, who has travelled in 39 countries on seven continents to produce a breathtaking and unique collection of photographs. The book is as important for its visual riches as it is for its groundbreaking content. Birds and People is also exceptional in that the author has solicited contributions from people worldwide. Personal anecdotes and stories have come from more than 650 individuals in 81 different countries. They range from university academics to Mongolian eagle hunters, and from Amerindian shamans to some of the most celebrated writers of our age. The sheer multitude of voices in this global chorus means that Birds and People is both a source book on why we cherish birds and a powerful testament to their importance for all humanity."

Crow Country

Mark Cocker

2007

"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."

A Tiger in the Sand: Selected Writings on Nature

Mark Cocker

2006

"In seven works of non-fiction, especially in Birders and the universally acclaimed Birds Britannica, Mark Cocker has established himself as one of the foremost writers on nature and wilderness. In his most lyrical work to date, he has drawn together the best of his writing on wildlife, mainly taken from columns for the Guardian and Guardian Weekly. These carefully distilled articles, over a hundred in all, illustrate some of his most enduring themes over the last twenty years - the magical dynamism of birds, as well as the subtle beauty, vast skies and wildlife riches of the Norfolk landscape. In its celebration of the natural world, the hugely varied selection also demonstrates a concern to champion the despised and neglected - rats, gulls, crows (the 'Black Beasts' of his first section) - as much as it explores some of the most charismatic creatures on Earth - penguins, whales, lions and elephants. Cocker is equally good at evoking the commonplace mysteries of garden blackbirds and thrush's song, as he is the exotic otherness of mountain gorillas or the one-horned rhinoceros. With its attention to detail, especially the sharpness of perception and the precise use of language, the writing in A Tiger in the Sand shows qualities more usually associated with poetry than with prose."

Birds Britannica

Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey

Specialist text research: Jonathan Elphick

Chatto & Windus

2005

"Birds Britannica is a lavishly illustrated, comprehensive cultural study, species by species, of all the birds in Britain. Neither an identification guide nor a behavioural study (though both of these subjects enter its field), it concentrates on the cultural links and social history of birds and humans, and captures the essence of why birds matter. The product of years of research, it is based in part on contributions from the public who sent in their memories and experiences of birds, making this a rich trove of stories and observations."

Birders: Tales Of A Tribe

Mark Cocker

2001

"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, for birds. Birders is the story of this community, of its characters, its rules, its equipment (only a certain type of notebook will do), and its adventures - often hilariously funny, Birders is also a work of love - the story of what birds can do to the human heart."

Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples

Mark Cocker

1998

"A study of four different conflicts between so-called civilised and indigenous peoples, which considers the subsequent changing historic portrayals of each clash. The conquest of Mexico, the British onslaught on the Tasmanian Aborigines, the uprooting of the Apaches, and the German campaign against the tribes of South West Africa are considered."

Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century

Mark Cocker

1992

"This is a mixture of biography, history and literary criticism which studies travel-writing as both a literary form and a cultural phenomenon. It focuses in particular on five writers - Harry St John Philby, Wilfred Thesiger, Laurens van der Post, Gavin Maxwell and the Himalayan explorer, Frederick Bailey - and analyzes the relationship between their lives and their works, identifying a number of key themes that recur in the experience of all the writers. The author posits the idea of the traveller as a social type and considers their role within British society. He also looks at the way in which foreign landscapes and their inhabitants have been used by British travel-writers as a source of image and fantasy, as well as a means to self-definition and as a vehicle to communicate their own literary and political vision."

Richard Meinertzhagen: Soldier, Scientist and Spy

Mark Cocker

1989

"In a long career that found him combining the roles of soldier, spy and ornithologist, Richard Meinertzhagen's varied exploits included attending the Paris Peace Conference with T.E.Lawrence and publishing diaries of life in Kenya. This biography charts the life and times of a controversial figure."

A Himalayan Ornithologist: Life and Work of Brian Houghton Hodgson

Mark Cocker and Carol Inskipp

1988

"Our present-day knowledge of the birds of the Himalayan region can be traced back to the pioneering work of Brian Houghton Hodgson who was a 19th century naturalist, scholar and administrator. Born in Cheshire in 1800, Hodgson was resident in Kathmandu for many years and he described or collected over 120 species of birds new to science. He trained a team of Nepalese artists to produce water-colour plates of the birds of the Himalayas; this was never completed, but the collection of paintings is now in the possession of the Zoological Society of London. Most of the 49 plates selected for this volume have never been published before. While concentrating primarily upon Hodgson's ornithological work, this book also describes his contributions to other branches of natural history and ethnography, as well as his work on the nature of the Buddhist religion. His administrative career is also outlined and there is a chapter describing the changes to the bird life of the region since Hodgson's time."