It has been our bent at least since Gilbert White's monumental work of 1789, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. This “meditation on birds, landscape and nature” and study of rooks, especially in the Yare Valley where he lives in Norfolk, is Cocker's latest addition to one British tradition that lives vigorously on.

We read weekly of the latest species to be under threat. Not so the rook, which has proved as robust as its cousins, the jackdaw and carrion crow - even if another cousin, the red-billed chough, is now all too rare. Cocker reckons we now have more than a million pairs of rooks in Britain. Mixed with history and travelogue, this is an account of several teeming rookeries in England and Scotland, and of how these highly sociable birds are born and pass their days (and nights).

One wants more on the considerable folklore about rooks. Can they forecast weather and sense the approach of death? Why were or, who knows, why are they still thought to escort the souls of the virtuous dead to Heaven? Why do we call a neighbourhood of thieves a rookery? Instead of addressing these and other questions, Cocker gives us too much about his diurnal difficulties and the restoration of his house in between his “rooking” at dawn or dusk. This is a book more from the mind than the heart, and Cocker's prose is more an artisan's than an artist's. But this is a useful contribution to one thing that Britain still does best.

Crow country by Mark Cocker
Vintage, £8.99 Buy the book here

Times Recommends

• The Sisters Who Would Be Queen by Leanda de Lisle
• The TS Eliot prize preview
• It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways and the Search for the next American Music by Amanda Petrusich