Beautiful Books to Celebrate Garden Birds
RHS Pocket Guide to Garden Birds is a beautifully designed book to help you identify and help the most common garden birds in the UK. Whether watching goldfinches on teasels or making space for wrens to nest, this guide offers year-round guidance and inspiration.
The book also features information on the evolution, biology and behaviour of British birds, and contains 30 charming illustrated bird profiles.
Packed with RHS-approved advice on making bird-friendly spaces in your garden and beyond, this is the perfect companion for your potting bench, sunny garden seat or outdoor ramble!
Tips to Help Our Garden Birds
- Keep cats indoors at dusk and dawn, when birds are feeding.
- Don’t feed birds stale, mouldy or crusty bread (nor buttered bread, fat can smear on feathers, affecting weatherproofing and insulation).
- Never use coloured or tin bird houses (they can attract predators and overheat respectively).
- Read more on create safe havens for garden birds, and how to stop birds flying into windows.
- Don’t play birdsong near birds, it can confuse and attract predators.
Hadley Paper Goods (eco-cards to help RSPB)
Hadley Paper Goods has teamed up with the RSPB to sell delightful eco-friendly cards depicting various feathered friends, with 10% of profits going to the national’s charity to help our feathered friends.
These lovely cards feature a fact on the back, to help recipients learn about bird life. Each card is sold in an envelope made from a mix of recycled paper and citrus peels (that would otherwise go to landfill).
Puffin Chicks are mostly found in Northumberland, raised in shallow burrows by their parents, until they fledge at night, to live mostly on the sea. The recent ban on fishing for sandeels (those silvery fish you see in puffin beaks) is helping to restore populations.
Arctic Terns are tiny birds that migrate from the Arctic and Antarctic, to arrive in Northumberland, to nest on coastal beaches around April. Keep away, as they will dive-bomb intruders and have sharp bills!
They live on small fish and krill (so don’t buy supplements from stores, as all marine creatures need this important food source).
Lapwings are wading birds with acrobatic flying displays, and again will dive-bomb predators. These birds are now endangered due to lack of wetlands, also in Ireland (where they are the national bird).
Tips to Help Our Garden Birds
- Keep cats indoors at dusk and dawn, when birds are feeding.
- Don’t feed birds stale, mouldy or crusty bread (nor buttered bread, fat can smear on feathers, affecting weatherproofing and insulation).
- Never use coloured or tin bird houses (they can attract predators and overheat respectively).
- Read more on create safe havens for garden birds, and how to stop birds flying into windows.
- Don’t play birdsong near birds, it can confuse and attract predators.
Other Ways to Help RSPB
RSPB Teemill Store offers print-on-demand organic cotton t-shirts and sweatshirts (plus goods like reusable water bottles and shopping totes), all with lovely bird-friendly prints for men, women and children.
Everything is made with green energy and sent in zero-waste packaging, and you can send items back at end of use, for recycling. Again, profits from each sale helps RSPB. Ideal to stash up on basics, or make nice eco-friendly gifts.
Set RSPB as your chosen charity at easyfundraising. Then any time you shop at participating stores or services, a portion of profits is donated to them, at no cost to you. This does not affect loyalty points.
A Beautiful Fun Guide to Our Garden Birds
Our Garden Birds is a delightful illustrated hardback gift book by pop artist (and ornithologist Matt Sewell), who pairs gorgeous art with descriptions of favourite garden birds.
From great tits ‘bossing the other birds around’ to the ‘playful yet shy buoyancy’ of bullfinches and the waxwing ‘like a computer-generated samurai finch’.
You’ll learn about common garden birds like tits, sparrows and finches, blackbirds and less common pied wagtails and redwings, along with migrating hoopoes.
From wood pigeons to ‘martins’ (house martins, swallows, swifts), tiny wrens to dunnocks, the crow family (including blue jays), robins, starlings and a few woodland birds (woodpeckers, owls and birds of prey), this is a wonderful and light-hearted read!
A Beautiful Book to Save Our Birds
Save Our Birds is a wonderful read. Leaving no habitat unexplored around the British Isles, he provides a wealth of practical advice on how to help birds in cities, coastlands, woodlands and farms.
Imagine a garden entirely without birds. Imagine a whole street empty of them; a town with no spring nests or morning birdsong; no swifts or swallows overhead on hot days. Actually, don’t. It’s far too horrible.
Our once insect-rich summers are now a thing of the past, due to pesticides and intensive farming practices.
Matt is passionate about saving our birds, and his writing will make you passionate too:
Put simply, a lot of our birds are endangered, because the UK and Europe just isn’t wild enough anymore. All of our outdoor spaces are owned, managed and pumped full of chemicals to yield as much from the earth as possible.
Matt Sewell is an artist and ornithologist who has written several best-selling books on bird and other wildlife. His designs for birds even feature on stamps on Isle of Man.
The Book of Birds (a dazzling celebration)
The Book of Birds is a collaboration between artist Jackie Morris and writer Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the giant book The Lost Words on treasuring words from the natural world. This dazzling celebration of British birdlife makes a truly wonderful gift.
With quieter dawns and spring, this is designed to bring back our birds, we still have time to save our bird friends from becoming endangered or extinct. Find a compendium of 49 bird species (all of which are in danger) – from avocat (the symbol of the RSPB) to yellowhammer. From Dipper to Dunnock and Kestrel to Kingfisher. The book shows readers how to identify each bird, whether in the city, by the river, up a mountain or at the ocean..
You’ll learn about each bird’s habits and habitat, patterns of flight and song, how they hunt, nest and raise their young. And how we can help them thrive. Each page is mesmerising with art in watercolour and gold, to inspire. Explore the ‘seven wonders’ of birds: Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight and Migration.
Seven years in the making, The Book of Birds is a love letter to the splendours and mysteries of birdlife, and a clarion call to halt the loss of birds from land, sea and sky.
From Dipper to Dunnock and Kestrel to Kingfisher, from mountain to ocean and city to river, Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane conjure the unique spirit and lifeway of each species. This is a book to be treasured by all.
An Illustrated Treasury on British Birds
Britain’s Birds is a charming illustrated treasury of 70 of Britain’s beautiful birds. With natural history facts, folklore and literary appearances, the books is a fascinating guide and makes the perfect gift for birders. The book features 40 custom illustrations.
Did you know blackbirds may have originally been white? Or the number of times you hear a cuckoo (determines how many children you’ll have?)
Or woodpeckers have special shock absorbers built into their beaks? Or in 1958, a puffin was blown inland to Bromley, where he knocked a man off his bicycle?
We’ve given human names to familiar garden birds, (Tom Tit, Jenny Wren) because we see them as friends. St Francis of Assisi (the patron saint of animals) reputedly duetted with a nightingale.
While a blackbird was said to have nested in the outstretched hand of Irish hermit St Kevin of Glendalough. Gaining trust of birds was a manifestation of holiness.
Jo Woolf is Writer in Residence at the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. She lives by the sea, where she writes about landscape, wildlife and history.
The Hidden Life of Garden Birds (a treasury)
The Hidden Life of Garden Birds is a beautifully illustrated book to over 50 of our garden birds, glimpsing into their everyday lives. From feeding behaviours to territorial conflict and breeding/nesting, learn how our familiar birds live each day.
Did you know that:
- Woodpeckers can learn simple codes?
- Hooded crows form connections with humans?
- A jay’s call affects a squirrel’s behaviour?
Dominic Couzens is an award-winning nature writer, with over 40 books published. He has regular columns in nature-writing magazines, and also is author of many books on British wildlife.
