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In the savage winter of 1962—Europe’s coldest in eighty years—a blackbird began roosting in the elderberry tree in Hockley Clarke’s overgrown garden. Clarke, a retired headmaster and lifelong birder, named him “Blackie” and began bringing the bird food every morning and evening. Soon, the blackbird was flying down to greet him with “a few glad chuckles,” and a quiet and extraordinary friendship began.
First published in 1978, Blackie & Co. is Clarke’s engaging chronicle of the blackbird family that took up residence in his backyard. What starts as a record of daily feedings and weather reports deepens into a lucid, moving reflection on attention, connection, and the limits of empathy across species. “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.”
In Clarke’s modest, reverent words, readers will find a kindred spirit to Gilbert White and Helen Macdonald: a naturalist who sees wild creatures not as symbols or scenery, but as beings with their own inner lives, worthy of our care and awe. With a foreword by Maria Popova, Blackie & Co. is a forgotten classic of uncommon grace—a reminder that love, in all its forms, is made not of sentiment, but of sympathy, patience, and shared time.
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.
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.
© Allan Amato
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
$24 • Hardcover • 5.875" x 6" x 8.5" • 128 pages • B&W illustrations
Nonfiction—Memoir / Nature Writing / Birding
Rights: World, Audio, Film / TV
eBook ISBN: 9781961341739
UK Pub: Jul 9, 2026 • UK Price: £17.99
