With a Bird, A Reader on Avian Kinship

by Daniel Nivon (Contributor), Marjolein Van Der Loo (Editor)

Speculative fiction, art, social science and ornithology take flight together in this imaginative reader proposing a multispecies dialogue with birds

Following the runaway success of A Tree, With a Bird, is the second installment in Onomatopee's five-year, five-volume publication series creating "rich encounters between folklore and critical research." As a reader on avian kinship, With a Bird, delves into the profound ways birds have inspired human understanding of life, blending scientific inquiry with spiritual reflection. Visual art, natural history, sociology, literature and more combine to explore how birds challenge and transcend boundaries—between human and non-human life, dream and reality, life and death, science and folklore and the domains of land, water and sky. Each chapter in this petite, canary-yellow paperback is dedicated to the symbolic roles birds play in human life, from death to dreams to freedom to fortune-telling.
In addition to new works and essays, With a Bird, also includes reprinted literary texts on our avian companions by Daisy Hildyard (The Second Body, 2017); John Berger (The White Bird, 1985); Nicholas Mirzoeff (The Whiteness of Birds, 2022); Maria Popova (The New York Times, 2024); Marianne Elisabeth Lien (Ducks into Houses, 2018) and Anna Tsing (The Sociality of Birds, 2022).

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthologies, Art

286 pages, Paperback

Published December 9, 2025

Reviews

[Atom Murata]

bird book bird book

[Tereza Cermakova]

incredible book. filled with so much information and passion.
very interesting (and incredibly saddening, tho not surprising...) to learn about ornithology's ties to colonization and slavery.
very exciting to see and learn about artworks inspired by birds and/or by living alongside them.
many new mind blowing informations about birds !! i love birds oohhhhoh oh i love birds !!!!!! 😊 did you know that birds dream ?! and they practice their songs and flight patterns in dreams ?!

[Delightful]

This is a difficult book to rate: it is part of a multi volume and multi exhibition extended art and performance art project that, and is a collection of stories and essays and artwork analyses all related in some fashion to the ways, real and imagined, birds and humans co-exist. The texts cover natural history, anthropology, history, art, and fictional narrative, with repeated forays into progressive feminist, post-colonial, and queer politics. There is also a vague occultic dimension to the assemblage as the mixed pictures and texts are meant to create a magical working alongside their more mundane impact: the primary goal bring to open, and change, reader's minds and eyes to birds, and their presence and independent, or codependent, lives.

The quality and profundity of the texts range widely, from well written and moving to somewhat clumsy and overwrought. Overall though, I think it succeeds in its main goal, though sometimes it comes across as preachy or tedious.

[Bogdana Skorik]

bird book is bird booking

[R1CEC4KE]

With A Bird, assembles a flock of texts, but like a parliament of birds, they don't always agree or get along. Personally, this is to the collection's benefit: Berger's piece "The White Bird," on taking an avian icon to discuss the aesthetics of mystery, finds itself nestled beside Mirzoeff's "The Whiteness of Birds," on the white supremacy and settler colonial aesthetic projects of ornithology and birdwatching which reduce these mysteries into fixed and subjugable categories. Rather than pit these pieces "against" each other, this ruffling of feathers rather productively helps the individual pieces become more fully fledged.

It helped that many of these texts were already mature before finding themselves in concert with the others. If my review of the first anthology in this series, A Tree, was concerned with the brevity and vagueness of the texts compiled therein, I was rather pleased that this was a thicker volume with longer, more fulfilling entries. Especially the republished works -- From Berger, Mirzoeff, Lowenhaupt Tsing, Popova, and Odom, among others -- were delightful to read, especially chirping alongside one another.

A note on design: it's, once again, splendid. Individual images of birds find their perch in the foreground of a two page spread. I only wish that these could have been in full colour (but printing is oh so expensive!). I also was tit-ilated by Ai Ozaki's drawings (excuse the triple entendre).

But -- like with A Tree, -- With A Bird, is a mixed bag. Of the written work that is not republished, I found myself very underwhelmed, if not outright frustrated by the "tell, don't show" expositionary style of the fiction exerpts, which felt a lot like being forcefed, or the jargon-laden theory-manifestos of the latter part of the work. Similarly to A Tree,, there were just so many clichés...

And on the use of AI... yeah, it doesn't spark joy. Where it is admitted, as in Sergio Rojas Chaves' "How to Cockatoo," it doesn't do anything in favour of the piece (actually: it seems to counteract it. In a piece, in the section on Identity and Imagination, which details the replacement of endemic bird imagery for that of an exoticised counterpart --the cockatoo--, compounding in an imaginary advertisement-oriented identity, it seems totally absurd to outsource the imaginative labour of postermaking to artifical intelligence, in order to contribute to the shift in identity being critiqued in the article by representing it through an AI generated case study.) And there are all kinds of points throughout the collection in which a repeated "not x, but y" style and unnecessarily embellished cadence hint at the presence of AI (in texts like Manjot Kaur's Hybrid Beings manifesto). Given how well studied the environmental impact of AI infrastructure is (not to mention all the other adverse impacts, hallucinations, fabulations and so on), it's kind of shocking for an ecologically-oriented publication to feature content made through these means.

[Brendan D]

After reading A Tree (which was astonishing), I expected more of the same. The pure artistry of this object and its elegantly spiritual design are absolutely of a piece. The qualitative aspects of the entries in this volume are markedly different — tending more on average than to the scientific style than the sublime. This is a small disappointment to me as I was positively spellbound by the first instalment, but I respect the decisions to weave this volume differently and I eagerly await the next. The opening pieces, which grapple with colonization and perspective sharing across species are stunning and worth the price of admission alone.

[Morgane]

Livre très intéressant pour sa richesse de ressources, d’informations et de créativités, que par le texte et les images. M’ayant ouvert l’esprit de façon large sur les animaux, plus précisément les oiseaux, notre relation avec eux et l’environnement. Je recommande très fortement. (Plus sûre des dates)

[Kelsey Halliday Johnson]

The reprinted texts (the John Berger and Maria Papova are undeniably the best reading I’ve done in a while, wow!) are just spectacular next to the art historical illustration montages. Amazing little gem of a book, swept me off my feet.

[Felix Brockley-Hatch]

Part anthology, exhibition, speculative-fiction, essays - this book is the perfect amalgam of bird facts, opinions and stories. The art is lovely too. J’adore!

(Thanks Drew for the best parting gift)

[Zoe]

Stunning, medicinal

[Lew Stanisława]

Amazing collection of art, science, thought and speculation.

[Serah Park]

bird book ❤️

[George]

perfect imo!!!! no notes, but also lots of notes and thoughts and sparks of ideas because of this wonderful little book

[Amanda]

Truly loved this collection of art and essays. I hope they continue publishing the series!