Completing Birds Britannica may have been a labour but it was a labour of love

Completing Birds Britannica may have been a labour, but it was a labour of love, and he speaks about it with real excitement.”What we have done is pull together an entire panoramic vision of the human relationship with birds in this country,” he said. “We’ve looked at the point of encounter; we’ve looked at every bird that has a ‘cultural profile’ and an interface with us It’s the Domesday account.”Nightjar. Birders: Tales of a Tribe (2001) is the first successful attempt to get under the skin of the obsessive, sometimes manic, British birdwatching community, convincingly conveying just what it is that makes grown men drop everything and rush hundreds of miles to Shetland or the Isles of Scilly to see a red-footed falcon or an olive-backed pipit. It has sold more than 20,000 copies in hardback.Now 44, married with two daughters and living in the Norfolk Broads, where barn owls and marsh harriers float over his house and a kingfisher zips through the garden, Cocker began his birding on the moors near his childhood home in the Peak District, and has travelled in search of birds all over the world.

“It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever written and probably ever shall. It took me three years and by the end I virtually couldn’t write. I was exhausted.”He seems a very appropriate author to succeed Richard Mabey, having a life divided equally between birding and writing. A series of books have built him a growing literary reputation, including Richard Meinhertzhagen, Soldier, Scientist and Spy, a biography of the adventurer and fraudster who was a friend and companion-in-arms of Lawrence of Arabia (1989); an investigation of the English travel-writing tradition, Loneliness and Time (1992); and a study of the impact of European colonisation on native cultures, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold (1998).But Cocker is first and foremost a lifelong bird enthusiast, and it is his most recent work – a bird book with a difference – that has brought him widespread recognition.

There will be 350 original pictures, mainly by one of Britain’s best-known bird photographers, Chris Gomersall.And just as Flora Britannica went beyond botany, so its bird follow-up goes beyond mere ornithology – although it is there in abundance – into folklore, superstition, social history, poetry, art, gastronomy, linguistics, and all the ways in which feathered beings have touched our lives.As with the earlier book, hundreds of ordinary bird lovers have contributed (they are all acknowledged) and their stories and observations have been woven by Cocker, using his own encyclopaedic knowledge of birds, into essays on each species, some of them of considerable length.Creating the ne plus ultra of British bird lore has been a Herculean task “Yes, it’s a big tome,” Cocker said. I’ll do that for months and months, and when I’ve finished I’ll come down to London and have large, spacious evenings…”This is a man who socialises with Prince Charles and Peter Mandelson, as well as the usual roster of comedian friends. Who does he go “larging” with in London?”Hugh Laurie, Ben Elton… But surely you’re above wanting to know about my showbiz pals?” Not at all, I assure him, but he’s moved on.. “I have a particular fondness for restaurateurs. Some of my best friends are cooks and chefs – they know how to have a good evening.”The young, however, he feels have lost the knack of entertaining. “Kids don’t seem to have the energy to do anything remarkable or imaginative. In the 1920s, if people had a party, they had an extraordinary theme.

You know, the Sitwells would have a ‘paradox party’ where you had to come as a new paradox. But now invitations come covered in banners like a bad website. People can’t be bothered to throw a party without getting it sponsored by vodka manufacturers or ghastly luxury goods companies such as Luis Vuitton. It’s so squalid and dispiriting.”All of which makes Fry sounds like a grumpy old man, something he denies. “I was asked to be on that Grumpy Old Men programme and I refused because I said, ‘If I go on, I will be grumpy about grumpy old men.’ I think there’s nothing more pathetic than people moaning about mobile phones.”In fact, one consistent claim by Fry over the years is his absolute dread of becoming bourgeois “There’s a line in Howards End… Leonard Bast – he’s 17 and a clerk in the City – and Helen’s looking at him and she uses the damning phrase, ‘He’d given up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a set of ideas’ I’d hate that.