Blackie & Co.: Blackbirds in My Garden

In the savage winter of 1962—Europe’s coldest in eighty years—a blackbird began roosting in the elderberry tree outside Hockley Clarke’s window. Clarke, a retired headmaster and lifelong birder, named him “Blackie” and began bringing him food every morning and evening. What followed was a quiet miracle: an exchange of trust and tenderness between a man and a bird, deepening into something like friendship.

First published in 1978, Blackie & Co. is Clarke’s luminous account of the blackbird family that took up residence in his garden. With warmth, humility, and wonder, Clarke records the small, daily rituals through which interspecies connection can take root: a chuckle of greeting, a flight to the hand, a shared rhythm of weather and care. “I spoke to him; he knew my voice and I am sure that he answered in his own language,” Clarke writes. “There was perfect trust between us, a source of joy to me, and it must have been a comfort to him.”

Echoing the spirit of Gilbert White, J. A. Baker, and Helen Macdonald, Clarke reminds us that our relationships with other species need not be symbolic or sentimental to be profound. With a foreword by Maria Popova—who describes the book as “a bright assurance of the tenacity of life”—Blackie & Co. is a forgotten classic of uncommon grace, a hymn to the unspectacular wonders of the everyday.

About Marginalian Editions

Marginalian Editions is a collaboration between Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books and writer Maria Popova, who selects and introduces forgotten masterworks that deserve a second life—uncommon books at the intersection of wonder and our search for meaning, from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s literature.

“I inhaled it in a day, each page a radiance of curiosity and kindness, the whole of it a bright assurance of the tenacity of life, a reminder that no matter the conditions of living, it is the unconditional that saves us. Friendship is a lifeline twined of truth and tenderness. That we extend it to each other is benediction enough. To extend it across the barrier of biology and sentience, to another creature endowed with a wholly other consciousness, partakes of the miraculous.”

—Maria Popova, from the Foreword

Hockley Clarke was an English author and nature lover who began birding as a teenager in the trenches of WWI, listening for the song of the nightingale over the sound of machine guns. He went on to write numerous books about birds and for forty years edited the birding magazine Birds and Country.

Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning—sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse—a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry—has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.

Blackie & Co.: Blackbirds in My Garden • ISBN: 9781961341722

Pub: May 26, 2026

$19 • Hardcover • 4.5” x 6.375” • 144 pages • B&W illustrations

Nonfiction—Memoir / Nature Writing / Birds

Rights: World, Audio, Film / TV

eBook ISBN: 9781961341739

UK Pub: Jul 9, 2026 • UK Price: £13.99