This beautiful shot is of the wader spectacular at RSPB Snettisham during the Literature & Landscape festival weekend last year – taken by Mark Cocker and shared with his kind permission. It is a reminder that North Norfolk’s 100 miles of coastline is part of a super highway for hundreds of thousands of migrating birds, and it stirs up a sense of awe for this class of creatures who seem effortlessly capable of miraculous feats.
Here are some titles about birds by our 2025 writers:
- Whistling in the Dark (nightingales) by Richard Mabey
- Crow Country, Birds Britannica, Birds and People, One Midsummer’s Day (swifts) by Mark Cocker
- Bird by Bird, The Wren and Murmurations of Love (starlings) by Julia Blackburn
- In Search of one Last Song by Patrick Galbraith
- our three poets have all written about birds including a curlew (Katrina Porteous), a nuthatch (Bernard O’Donoghue), rooks and a heron (Matthew Hollis) – to name a few
All these admire the difference, culture and capabilities of these warm-blooded creatures of the air, who look down at us on the ground, who dance, dive, float, project skeins of sound from tiny lungs and who were winging with expert navigation across oceans and continents for millennia before we even discovered the existence of the rest of our planet.
Birds have inspired, fascinated and been enmeshed in the rhythms, beliefs, traditions and creations of humanity going back as far as records exist. They, their habitats and ways of life are vulnerable and we are losing many of them.
Here are some images of birds we are losing, by Beatrice Forshall – one of our artists in this year’s exhibition:
Please come and join us!
Literature & Landscape 