Crow Country

Cocker is a beautiful writer...the twilight and his beloved rooks bring out the poet in him...a loving observation of the wonders on the wing in everyday England

Ann Wroe, Daily Telegraph

The nation's most observant and intuitive of nature writers

Sunday Express

As obsessive a celebration of rook and jackdaw - and of human immersion in nature - as anyone could wish

Irish Times

Luminously beautiful and dartingly intelligent, Cocker's obsessive quest after the ancient trails of rooks across our dusk skies leads to an almost sacred space: a place where the landscape of the imagination and the lovingly, minutely observed realities of the natural world come to roost together

Richard Mabey

Guaranteed to ensure that you never look at a crow in quite the same way again

Guardian

A splendid book...Crow Country's narrative of rookish discovery unfolds with splendid variety, incorporating scientific exposition, biography, environmental history, poetry, memoir and biography... Your heart beats faster as he describes a pack of tight-packed wigeon flushing in fear from an icy creak. You feel the shock of recognition as a barn owl meets his gaze. It's infectiously emotional. At it's most lyrical Crow Country matches the heights of that deeply eerie work of avian obsession JA Baker's The Peregrine; yet at its most scientific, it could sit alongside the best ornithological monographs... Crow Country is a significant, beautiful work

New Statesman

Fabulous... Like all classic works of natural history, is is an extraordinary revelation of riches and wonders and that lie at our doorsteps, completely ignored

Independent

Exquisitely written, passionate exploration of the local and commonplace

BBC Wildlife

A vivid example of the "new nature writing" it is a lyrical and intense evocation of the world of jackdaws and rook, and an elegy on watchfulness

Daily Telegraph

Cocker's gift is to draw you into his hobby so deftly that you quickly begin to share his every enthusiasm

Observer