I tell a lot of lies about birds. That’s about it, really.

Bird Signs

Star signs don’t interest birds very much as, for example, most British birds are ‘born’ between May and July which makes for pretty boring late-night conversations about star signs as all of them are Taurus, Gemini or Cancer. They instead use a very complex system involving the time and date that an egg was laid, when it hatched and when the chick fledged. This is way too complicated to go into here (and frankly dull). What really fascinates birds, however, is the fact that humans can be born in any month of the year. Birds claim to be able to correctly identify in which month of the year any individual human was born just through careful observaton of their behaviur. It was a very short step from there to them matching up the behaviour of each of the ’12 months of human’ to 12 birds. Here I have tried to explain what it means when one bird nods at a human and says ‘blackbird’ to his mate. Clearly this system is full of nuance, tradition and insult that I cannot hope to properly convey, and we have to remember that birds are dreadful liars anyway. I would like to add, though, may we all aspire to be wrens. See more here http://www.yvettebrownworld.co.uk/bird-signs/

Book Pages

I own quite a lot of bird field guides.  Modern field guides are excellent but they just don’t have the entertainment value of the of older ones where someone has carefully drawn dead, possibly stuffed, birds in unfeasible postures, written something charming but not necessarily accurate about them, and then had the whole collection published using less than outstanding print techniques.  Not to be outdone, I have photographed some of my wholly inaccurate triangular paper birds interacting with sticks, and have written some lies about them.  I  have printed these pages on some lovely A4 mottled paper and mounted them. See more here http://www.yvettebrownworld.co.uk/bird-book-pages/

Bird Books

In recent years I have been exploring the possibilities of cramming a story about birds into space made inside old books to try to  get across the sense I have of birds living with us yet inhabiting their own world.  Stories belong in books, and books should be old, cloth bound, well-thumbed and beautiful. The books I use are about to be sent to landfill or I rescue them from boot-sales and charity shops, and generally those that have had huge print runs so I’m not destroying anything rare. I fill them with birds and dogs made from paper clay I make myself, paper cut from old gardening books, and other odds and ends. I’m still not all that comfortable about cutting up a book but it’s better than seeing them thrown away. See more here http://www.yvettebrownworld.co.uk/books/