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One Midsummer's Day: The story of all life on Earth told through the flight of a single bird
It takes a whole universe to make one small black bird
The bestselling author of Crow Country and writer of the Guardian's Country Diary tells the story of all life on Earth through a single day spent in the company of swifts
Swifts are among the most extraordinary of all birds. Their migrations span continents and their twelve-week stopover, when they pause to breed in European rooftops, is the very definition of summer. They may nest in our homes but much about their lives passes over our heads. No birds are more wreathed in mystery. Captivated, Mark Cocker sets out to capture their essence.
Over the course of one day in midsummer he devotes himself to his beloved black birds as they spiral overhead. Yet this is also a book about so much more. Swifts are a prism through which Cocker explores the profound interconnections of the whole biosphere.
From the deep-sea thermal vents where life was born to the 15 million degrees at the core of our Sun, he shows that life is a singular and glorious continuum. These birds without borders are a perfect symbol to express the unity of the living planet. But they also illuminate how no creature, least of all ourselves, can be said to be alive in isolation. We are all inextricably connected.
Drawing deeply on science, history, literature and a lifetime of close observation, One Midsummer's Day is a dazzling and wide-ranging celebration of all life on Earth by one of our greatest nature writers.
The bestselling author of Crow Country and writer of the Guardian's Country Diary tells the story of all life on Earth through a single day spent in the company of swifts
Swifts are among the most extraordinary of all birds. Their migrations span continents and their twelve-week stopover, when they pause to breed in European rooftops, is the very definition of summer. They may nest in our homes but much about their lives passes over our heads. No birds are more wreathed in mystery. Captivated, Mark Cocker sets out to capture their essence.
Over the course of one day in midsummer he devotes himself to his beloved black birds as they spiral overhead. Yet this is also a book about so much more. Swifts are a prism through which Cocker explores the profound interconnections of the whole biosphere.
From the deep-sea thermal vents where life was born to the 15 million degrees at the core of our Sun, he shows that life is a singular and glorious continuum. These birds without borders are a perfect symbol to express the unity of the living planet. But they also illuminate how no creature, least of all ourselves, can be said to be alive in isolation. We are all inextricably connected.
Drawing deeply on science, history, literature and a lifetime of close observation, One Midsummer's Day is a dazzling and wide-ranging celebration of all life on Earth by one of our greatest nature writers.
329 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 1, 2023
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222 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 29, 2023
Why is it that books seem to bunch together by topic, with several about Henry James or swifts or whatever all being published within the same year or few years? It’s unfortunate for Mark Cocker, a well-respected author on birds and environmental issues in general, that he is two years behind Charles Foster and Sarah Gibson with this work on swifts. I also think he attempts too much, in terms of both literary strategy and subject matter (see the second part of the subtitle), and so loses focus.
The book employs a circadian structure, recording what he sees from his garden from one midsummer evening to the next as he looks up at the sky. Within this framework he delivers a lot of information about the world’s swift species, a fair bit of it familiar to me from those previous books; more novel are his stories of remarkable sightings, like a vagrant white-throated needletail in the Outer Hebrides (it later died in a collision with a wind turbine). But he also tries to set swifts in the context of the grand sweep of evolution. I skipped over these sections, which felt superfluous. With his literary allusions, Cocker is aiming for something like Tim Dee’s exceptional Greenery but falls short.
This could have made a superb concentrated essay, maybe as part of a collection devoting each chapter to a different species, because his passion is clear and his metaphors excellent as he holds up swifts as an emblem of the aerial life, and of hope (“In a social screaming display these weaponised shapes blaze together as a black-swarming meteor in a widening orbit that burns over the houses or between them”). The few-page run-on sentence about how humanity has gotten itself into the climate crisis is pretty great (though Lev Parikian did so much more concisely in Into the Tangled Bank: It’s “f***ing f***ed”). But Foster has written the definitive tribute to swifts, The Screaming Sky, and in just 150 small pages.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
The book employs a circadian structure, recording what he sees from his garden from one midsummer evening to the next as he looks up at the sky. Within this framework he delivers a lot of information about the world’s swift species, a fair bit of it familiar to me from those previous books; more novel are his stories of remarkable sightings, like a vagrant white-throated needletail in the Outer Hebrides (it later died in a collision with a wind turbine). But he also tries to set swifts in the context of the grand sweep of evolution. I skipped over these sections, which felt superfluous. With his literary allusions, Cocker is aiming for something like Tim Dee’s exceptional Greenery but falls short.
This could have made a superb concentrated essay, maybe as part of a collection devoting each chapter to a different species, because his passion is clear and his metaphors excellent as he holds up swifts as an emblem of the aerial life, and of hope (“In a social screaming display these weaponised shapes blaze together as a black-swarming meteor in a widening orbit that burns over the houses or between them”). The few-page run-on sentence about how humanity has gotten itself into the climate crisis is pretty great (though Lev Parikian did so much more concisely in Into the Tangled Bank: It’s “f***ing f***ed”). But Foster has written the definitive tribute to swifts, The Screaming Sky, and in just 150 small pages.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
June 22, 2023
living on a purpose built housing estate called the swifts has meant avoiding their existence is an impossibility. hundreds of swifts fly over our house, acting as the shooting hun marking the beginning of summer. these little black birds have long been a relaxing summer watch, even if their screams create quite the match for conversations in the garden. however, the excitement of seeing the odd swift actually stop flying to feed their chicks is well worth the sacrifice of our ears. one midsummer catches the warm glow of watching them in the garden so immaculately. cocker writes this dipping into the extended anecdote of watching them in the garden, inviting you into watching the swifts with him. the book reveals the wider significance of these birds, despite their endangered status. "a swift is all the hope you will ever need", rings all too true to me as they serve as such a personal reminder to keep going.
August 21, 2024
Begonnen met lezen bij de aankomst van 'onze' eerste gierzwaluwen, en geëindigd bij het vertrek van mijn geliefde zomervogels.
July 13, 2023
After reading an ecstatic review, I thought this might be in the style of Godfrey-Smiths Other Minds which has transformed our thinking of octopuses or Lars Chitta's Mind of a Bee. Unfortunately, it's not in that genre and is a lightweight discussion of a remarkable bird. It has limited aspirations and the publisher hasn't even bothered with illustrations. Nothing wrong with the book or it's intentions, it's just not very enlightening if you prefer a scientifically grounded approach.
July 10, 2023
A lyrical and entirely original story of evolution encapsulated in one bird. Utterly spellbounding.
March 1, 2023
Thanks to the generosity of Karen Lloyd I was posted a copy of Mark Cocker's latest book to review. This was a double privilege, firstly because I am a fan of Mark's work and secondly because the book doesn't actually come out until June.
When I learned Mark Cocker was going to write about Swifts in his new work I was intrigued. Works like Crow Country are partly staple texts because they distil a lot of knowledge of well studied species, whereas so much is still to be discovered about Swifts.
This is probably a good point at which to say that this book is about Swifts but it's also not about Swifts. In the prologue Mark explains that the book has been in the offing for fifteen years, and was originally going to be about Blackbirds. The underlying concept that remains in the final work is the interconnectedness of the bird under discussion, the wider biosphere and ultimately us and our impacts on those interrelationships.
This is underpinned by a structure based on a notional day of watching Common Swifts from Mark's garden. This device is effective because Mark has put the time in with his screaming summer visitors and it shines through in his knowledge of their behaviour, augmented by extensive research including personal discussion with a number of authorities on these birds.
So far so typically Mark Cocker I guess. But there's more to it than that. As Mark says in the prologue this is his most ambitious book. The whole history of the planet is covered, and there's quite a lot of more scientific content than in, say, Birders: Tales of a Tribe. For me the acid test of this is whether it remains readable, and I am pleased to be able so say it does.
The final pages of the book take a fast paced trip through the threats facing swifts and the wider ecosystem. The damage done by our actions is writ large, sharks kill four people a year whereas people kill 100 million sharks etc. I wouldn't want to give any plot spoilers here, but I think the conclusion is an appropriate balance of realism and hope.
One of the hallmarks of good nature writing for me is that it makes you take a fresh look at things you thought you already knew about. One Midsummer's Day has this in spades, whilst probably also telling most readers lots of things they didn't already know about. It's a tremendous achievement, and whilst it hasn't taken a decade and a half to write it's easy to see why the gestation was protracted. But I also liked some of the small details, such as Mark affording the Swifts in his nestboxes privacy in a world where even nature proponents are increasingly intrusive in their approach.
As a birder that's what I know best so is it a good read for that section of the potential market? I think it is, this is someone savvy enough to find a vagrant needletail in Britain and very knowledgeable about ornithology. But above all it's an author who conveys the everyday behaviour of everyday birds in an exceptional way, and the enigmatic Swift is a worthy subject for his latest and in many ways best work.
When I learned Mark Cocker was going to write about Swifts in his new work I was intrigued. Works like Crow Country are partly staple texts because they distil a lot of knowledge of well studied species, whereas so much is still to be discovered about Swifts.
This is probably a good point at which to say that this book is about Swifts but it's also not about Swifts. In the prologue Mark explains that the book has been in the offing for fifteen years, and was originally going to be about Blackbirds. The underlying concept that remains in the final work is the interconnectedness of the bird under discussion, the wider biosphere and ultimately us and our impacts on those interrelationships.
This is underpinned by a structure based on a notional day of watching Common Swifts from Mark's garden. This device is effective because Mark has put the time in with his screaming summer visitors and it shines through in his knowledge of their behaviour, augmented by extensive research including personal discussion with a number of authorities on these birds.
So far so typically Mark Cocker I guess. But there's more to it than that. As Mark says in the prologue this is his most ambitious book. The whole history of the planet is covered, and there's quite a lot of more scientific content than in, say, Birders: Tales of a Tribe. For me the acid test of this is whether it remains readable, and I am pleased to be able so say it does.
The final pages of the book take a fast paced trip through the threats facing swifts and the wider ecosystem. The damage done by our actions is writ large, sharks kill four people a year whereas people kill 100 million sharks etc. I wouldn't want to give any plot spoilers here, but I think the conclusion is an appropriate balance of realism and hope.
One of the hallmarks of good nature writing for me is that it makes you take a fresh look at things you thought you already knew about. One Midsummer's Day has this in spades, whilst probably also telling most readers lots of things they didn't already know about. It's a tremendous achievement, and whilst it hasn't taken a decade and a half to write it's easy to see why the gestation was protracted. But I also liked some of the small details, such as Mark affording the Swifts in his nestboxes privacy in a world where even nature proponents are increasingly intrusive in their approach.
As a birder that's what I know best so is it a good read for that section of the potential market? I think it is, this is someone savvy enough to find a vagrant needletail in Britain and very knowledgeable about ornithology. But above all it's an author who conveys the everyday behaviour of everyday birds in an exceptional way, and the enigmatic Swift is a worthy subject for his latest and in many ways best work.
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June 21, 2025A rhapsody on the "aerial perfection" of the swift, which I initially thought might fall prey to that nature writer favouritism whereby the author loves one class of creature so much that they end up a little peevish with everything that isn't them, and especially the most adjacent: just as there was that book a few years back by the biologist who loved wasps and thought bees were mugs, so I got the impression early on that Cocker found swallows to be a bit basic, which is unfortunate when I can't reliably tell the difference between the two. Fortunately, it soon turns out that over the course of human history, that has often been the case, even though we've also now established that the two are much less closely related than previously assumed*. No, for all that he loves swifts, as the birds who best incarnate the human dream of flying, his aim here is also to use them as a way into the whole interlocking tapestry of life. So the amount of insects they munch their way through takes us to the sheer mass of insects on Earth, and how they, the angiosperms and the fungi between them make up so much of the biosphere compared to interlopers like birds or us. Or those little birds darting through the air, seemingly so fragile, turn out not only to cover vast distances around the globe, but to sleep miles above its surface, to navigate with reference to a magnetic field coming from fathoms below it. The big picture material is peppered with amazing facts (there's a swiftlet nest in Borneo that seems to have been in use for 50,000 years!), which are fascinating in themselves, but also serve a wider point. Because woven in with the hymn to those magnificent flyers, Cocker's compelling argument is that whatever muddle-headed anti-science types and wannabe Romantics may say to the contrary (he elects DH Lawrence as representative whipping boy, which is always fine by me), learning more about our planet, the life with which we share it and the enormous universe in which it exists should make the world seem more miraculous, not less.
*Always the problem with non-fiction, of course; the older you get and the more you read, the clearer it becomes how much more falsifiable it is than fiction. At one stage Cocker makes passing reference to Galileo being "the first human to observe the interweaving orbit of four of Jupiter's moons through his telescope (it is actually now known to have seventy-nine!)." Well, in the two years since this book was published those digits have been swapped, and by the time you read this it may well have acquired another dozen.
*Always the problem with non-fiction, of course; the older you get and the more you read, the clearer it becomes how much more falsifiable it is than fiction. At one stage Cocker makes passing reference to Galileo being "the first human to observe the interweaving orbit of four of Jupiter's moons through his telescope (it is actually now known to have seventy-nine!)." Well, in the two years since this book was published those digits have been swapped, and by the time you read this it may well have acquired another dozen.
June 5, 2025
What faces a young swift is a metamorphosis no less than if it were a larval insect bursting from the chrysalis as a winged imago. What hatched as a toad-mouthed lizard has already morphed to a light-wreathed angel, but now it must go from a condition of complete reliance upon parents to independence, instantly and without alternative. It must launch itself from a dusty, dark roof and fly out to the Sun. There are no second chances. It is a one-shot deal. It must fly, but fly perfectly, having never done so. It must simultaneously learn to feed and do so immediately... [loc. 2361]
Mark Cocker frames his narrative as a single summer day, from dawn to dusk. He draws on history, physics and anecdote to support his hypothesis that 'it takes a whole universe to make just one small black bird', and his account is nature writing at its best -- discursive, poetic, emotional, scientific, full of anecdotes and unexpected facts. (He suggests, based on the writings of Pliny, that swifts did not inhabit urban environments until after the 1st century AD.)
There's plenty of sound information about the lifecycle, the migrations and the flight of swifts, but there is also a continuo of Cocker's sheer joy in their existence, and in the complexities of the natural world. He writes of 'my ever-deepening appreciation that, as far as we know, we live among the greatest event in the universe, partaking of the deepest mysteries and the grandest miracle possibly across 100 billion galaxies' [loc. 306] and I feel an echo of the same awe. I was also fascinated by his account of avian migration: an organ in the right eye of migrant birds that somehow perceives magnetic force, and a grain of magnetite close to the olfactory nerve. And I was, am, uplifted by his sheer delight (and his use of delight as a verb) in the manifold splendours, connections and complexities of the world around him.
I read most of One Midsummer's Day in my garden, glancing up often to watch swifts circle and scream overhead in a cloudless blue sky.
The birds were engaged in their own split-second chase. Each swerve filleted a beetle from air. Their lines were smooth and effortless. They reminded me of blue tuna coursing at will among bait-balls of fry. It was chaos but compounded of clarity and exactitude, and it was exhilarating to see such purity of movement. [loc. 2286]
February 7, 2025
I started reading this book on a long-distance bike ride from the East Midlands to central Scotland in July-August 2024.
I properly got into birds in early 2023, and swifts quickly became one of my favourites, especially after watching huge numbers of common and pallid swifts zooming around in Valença, on the Portuguese-Spanish border, that May.
They're one of the species that I was familiar with before 'getting in to birds', although I probably couldn't have reliably distinguished them from swallows and martins in years past. But I've become quite taken with them, and indeed right now, as I write this review in the depths of a British winter, I quite miss the birds that won't reappear for at least a couple more months. Every time I see or hear them, especially when they're up close – it's a joy.
On my long-distance bike ride, I encountered many swifts, most memorably seeing dozens of them breeding in the low roof of a dentist's building in Snaith, which I spent a few minutes standing under, filming slow-motion video, and then the following day, when I was staying at the youth hostel in Helmsley, I spotted two fully-grown chicks peering out of one of the nest boxes on the eastern side of the building. It was my first time seeing swift chicks in a nest box; they must have been only days or even hours from fledging.
It was during that stay in YHA Helmsley that I started reading this book. I wanted to know more about the beautiful common swifts that I was seeing.
This book certainly gave me some of that. But it was also not the book that I was quite hoping to read, in that it was less focused on swifts than I would have liked.
I could've done myself a favour by reading the Goodreads description, which includes passages such as “Swifts are a prism through which Cocker explores the profound interconnections of the whole biosphere”, and “One Midsummer's Day is a dazzling and wide-ranging celebration of all life on Earth”. The stuff on the swifts themselves, I liked, but the rest of it (which I think tries to tell the whole story of life, and even of the universe, through swifts) was not pitched at the right level for me, and I found it neither particularly informative nor particularly enlightening.
But perhaps it's right for you. Overall, it's a pretty decent book.
I properly got into birds in early 2023, and swifts quickly became one of my favourites, especially after watching huge numbers of common and pallid swifts zooming around in Valença, on the Portuguese-Spanish border, that May.
They're one of the species that I was familiar with before 'getting in to birds', although I probably couldn't have reliably distinguished them from swallows and martins in years past. But I've become quite taken with them, and indeed right now, as I write this review in the depths of a British winter, I quite miss the birds that won't reappear for at least a couple more months. Every time I see or hear them, especially when they're up close – it's a joy.
On my long-distance bike ride, I encountered many swifts, most memorably seeing dozens of them breeding in the low roof of a dentist's building in Snaith, which I spent a few minutes standing under, filming slow-motion video, and then the following day, when I was staying at the youth hostel in Helmsley, I spotted two fully-grown chicks peering out of one of the nest boxes on the eastern side of the building. It was my first time seeing swift chicks in a nest box; they must have been only days or even hours from fledging.
It was during that stay in YHA Helmsley that I started reading this book. I wanted to know more about the beautiful common swifts that I was seeing.
This book certainly gave me some of that. But it was also not the book that I was quite hoping to read, in that it was less focused on swifts than I would have liked.
I could've done myself a favour by reading the Goodreads description, which includes passages such as “Swifts are a prism through which Cocker explores the profound interconnections of the whole biosphere”, and “One Midsummer's Day is a dazzling and wide-ranging celebration of all life on Earth”. The stuff on the swifts themselves, I liked, but the rest of it (which I think tries to tell the whole story of life, and even of the universe, through swifts) was not pitched at the right level for me, and I found it neither particularly informative nor particularly enlightening.
But perhaps it's right for you. Overall, it's a pretty decent book.
March 1, 2024
Cocker has ingeniously structured this book, so that it both covers Swifts as a species, and uses them to illustrate how interconnected all life is and hence the myriad of ways in which anthropegenic activity is ripping those connections apart.
But this is anything but a dour book. Cocker's sheer joy in Swifts, in his English countryside life, in the delicate beauty of the cosmos, infuses the book. There is wonder as he describes their astonishing altitude, seguing into how the atmosphere protects life; or covers how they hunt, and the astonishing proliferation of insect life and arthropods. All peppered with moments of oat cakes and hot tea, capturing the rhythm of a life that seems a little unrealistically idyllic, as if the book itself is asking us to slow down.
But this is anything but a dour book. Cocker's sheer joy in Swifts, in his English countryside life, in the delicate beauty of the cosmos, infuses the book. There is wonder as he describes their astonishing altitude, seguing into how the atmosphere protects life; or covers how they hunt, and the astonishing proliferation of insect life and arthropods. All peppered with moments of oat cakes and hot tea, capturing the rhythm of a life that seems a little unrealistically idyllic, as if the book itself is asking us to slow down.
January 13, 2024
A decent read, but I felt as though I learnt a lot more from Charles foster and Sarah Gibson's respective books on swifts. This one is more general in tone, placing swifts within the whole ecosystem, and while this is laudable, it rather sags in parts and feels less focused than the other publications that I've mentioned. I enjoyed the author's Claxton series more. The descriptions of the workings of an ant colony are certainly eye opening, but I feel that there are better books for the swift fanatic.
July 30, 2025
A book about swifts (my favourite birds), touching through their story in all of the wonders of evolution and ecology, taking one of its chapter headings from one of my favourite lines of poetry, all beautifully written? Has to be five stars from me. This is one I’ll re-read and return to, I’m sure. Reading it now, as the swifts have just departed from our skies for another year, brings sadness but also hope for their return. As Mark Cocker concludes: “a swift is all the hope you will ever need”.
May 5, 2024
2.5 stars. I expected a popular science book on swifts. This is not it, however: it is unnecessarily verbose, the author rambles on about his feelings, his perceptions or his breakfast. I gave up three chapters before the end, having realized there were only a few pages that I really enjoyed. Someone in an older review mentioned that recently, two other books on swifts were published: so I'm going to try one of those.
February 26, 2024
A thin volume that has been padded out with barely related filler
July 31, 2024
A beautiful book, made all the more poignant as I read it during swift season and have just finished today (31 July) as they are preparing to leave us again!
September 1, 2024
A tad heavy in places, but absolutely fascinating.
September 6, 2024
To be fair, this is a very worthy, well-written book with lots of information and facts. But I had to read it for book group and it isn't my sort of book, so found it incredibly boring.
September 29, 2024
An engaging and informative book, not only on the matter of Swifts, but of all non-human life.
August 18, 2025
3.5 stars
Good, not great.
Good, not great.
June 24, 2024
Mark Cocker wants us to enjoy the swift as much as he does: to feel a sense of wonder at its aerial acrobatics and its extraordinary journeys across continents. He wants us too to understand how all of life is inter-connected: how we all share the same origins if you go back far enough - to the Cretaceous period in fact. Mark Cocker, a non-scientist, explains all this in accessible language. And each chapter brings with it more knowledge about the swift - what and where it eats and nests, how far and how high it flies - everything that is known about this creature: while emphasising how much there is that is still unknown. He shows how farming practices have reduced drastically the insect numbers on which the bird depends, and so much else. Each chapter begins with Mark in his garden, at a different time of the day, observing the swifts on their daily round. Each chapter unfolds into demonstrating the swift's - and our - interconnectedness. Their numbers are drastically decreasing. Mark Cocker invites us to imagine a world with no swifts. I'd rather not.
August 16, 2023
Really enjoyable. Well written and wide ranging. It’s about swifts but so much more - the cosmos, evolution , environmental issues, etc.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews