How to See a Bird: Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s Exquisite Illustrated Field Guide to the Wonder of the Winged

“Split the Lark — and You’ll find the Music, ” Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?” In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the spirit of a creature — a distinction between scientific fact and poetic truth, between ways of looking and styles of seeing, Ursula K. Le Guin would capture an epoch later with her astute observation that while both celebrate what they describe, science objectifies the universe by describing it from the outside,… read article