Blackie and Co - Blackbirds in My Garden

By: Hockley Clarke

Published by McNally Jackson Books, 2026-05-26

From Marginalian Editions comes a moving meditation on our connection with other creatures, told through the unforgettable story of a family of blackbirds sharing a birder's backyard 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.