Jon Gower: You don’t have to live in a monastery to feel that gift of silence

Jon Gower is a writer, broadcaster and lifelong birder whose work spans more than forty books, from biography and travelogue to fiction and nature writing. A former BBC Wales arts and media correspondent, he has spent a lifetime weaving language, landscape and wildlife into his storytelling. His latest book, Birdland, is a personal journey through Britain’s birdlife – a world both familiar and changed over the past fifty years.

Raised on the Welsh coast and shaped by early adventures into marshland and open sky, Gower writes with a celebrant’s eye and a sense of urgency. Birdland reflects on the beauty and resilience of birds, the pressures they face, and the stubborn hope that still carries them across seasons and continents.

In this conversation for The Skylark, Gower speaks about finding freedom in nature as a boy, how birds have shaped his creative life, and why paying attention remains a vital act.

I grew up with my whole family sharing one room, which was literally the definition of claustrophobia. My father drank. We used to haul a zinc bath into the same room if we wanted a bath. So my early childhood was very confined and confining. Getting on my bike and riding out to the marshes near home was the very epitome of freedom.

I’d always been interested in nature because of my grandfather. He had his own one-man coal mine going out under the sea near our home – just him underground, listening to the earth above him, and the sea above that. A heroic figure in my mind. He also lied about his age to join the merchant navy at 15, and travelled to Kamchatka in Siberia at the end of the Russian Revolution. So this working-class miner had a sense of a much bigger world.

My grandfather kept birds. He trapped wild birds and bred them with canaries, creating mules. One of the most vivid memories I have is him lifting a sitting bird off an egg, placing it on the palm of my hand, and the chick hatching. It was like magic. He introduced me to birds and to books. Yet he couldn’t read. He was illiterate but knew there was something important about books. That stayed with me.

When I was 14, I read R. M. Lockley’s Shearwaters, and from that moment, I knew I had to see shearwaters. So I went to Skokholm Island, off the coast of Pembrokeshire, and worked unpaid for the Edward Grey Institute of Oxford University – staying up all night catching these extraordinary birds. I was entirely hooked. That’s where it started properly: birdwatching, books, birds. And now it’s been 50 years.

When I went to write Birdland, I wanted to reflect on how birdlife in Britain had changed over that half-century. So I went back to birdwatching with my childhood friend Gary Harper, who’s now the county bird recorder for Carmarthenshire. We hadn’t seen each other in decades, but we picked up where we left off.

The changes were obvious. We saw little egrets within minutes of arriving. When we were teenagers, seeing a little egret would have been a red-letter day. Now they’re commonplace. They’re breeding here. Herons, egrets – birds that have come from continental Europe because of climate change. So yes, the big story in those 50 years is climate change. You can see it in the northward drift of willow warblers and in drying habitats on the Hebrides.

Let’s not call it climate change. The climate emergency is a big cox'n call – it’s an emergency-light thing, saying: do something, do something quickly. And we’re not doing it.

We had a window to reconnect with nature. And then the noise returned

My book is partly a follow-up to Tom Bullough’s Sarn Helen, which is part travelogue, part conversation with climate scientists. His work reignited my sense of urgency. But I didn’t want to write something grim. I wanted to be a celebrant of nature. Simon Barnes once said something like, “I don’t know if the glass is half full or half empty, but I do know conservationists are the heroes.” That’s the tone I wanted. Not denial. Not doom. Celebration, and a kind of stubborn hope.

We live in a world full of noise – digital distractions, constant input. But during lockdown, when the volume turned down, people suddenly noticed birdsong. It had been there all along, but people heard it afresh. We had a window to reconnect with nature. And then the noise returned.

So much of the book is about paying attention. I describe watching a Brent goose in Leigh-on-Sea. I put my phone away and just looked. For an hour. I never give myself an hour to look at anything. The more I looked, the more beautiful it became – not just its markings, but the way it murmured and communicated. That was one of my best birdwatching moments. And you can do that with a chaffinch in a city park.

Brent geese feed up on the marshes of southern England at this time of year, then fly off to Siberia. These birds make extraordinary journeys. And they depend on others. If snowy owls are nesting near them, they drive away foxes that would otherwise take their eggs. It’s a kind of weird Siberian symbiosis. That connection between a goose in Essex and an owl in Siberia – that’s the miracle. 

The silence wasn’t empty. It was full of the sound of choughs, of swallows, of seals keening from the rocks. 

I went back to Bardsey Island while writing the book – a place I first visited in 1976. Happiest I’ve ever been: learning to swim, climbing cliffs, immersed in wildness. While there, I took part in a morning silence session led by a Quaker. We sat in an old pig-shed-turned-oratory for 30 minutes. I thought I’d be able to time it in my head, like in broadcasting. But time changed. And I realised, not just that I was getting old – I was old. And I took that thought into the silence.

Something happened by way of a resolution. I came out more of a celebrant. The silence wasn’t empty. It was full of the sound of choughs, of swallows, of seals keening from the rocks. That half-hour was a gift. It felt like thirty hours. Or three seconds. You don’t have to live in a monastery to feel that. Just grant yourself that moment. That arm of silence.

As for birds and creativity – there’s something universally symbolic in flight. Birds represent freedom. And they come in so many forms. For me, the Manx shearwater is a kind of familiar spirit. It leaves Welsh waters in autumn to fly across the South Atlantic. I’ve spent much of my life travelling between Wales and South America, like the birds.

You meet people in the birding world and form instant friendships – you speak the same language. It’s almost a shared custodial feeling about the world.

Sometimes people ask how I stay optimistic. It’s hard. But I travelled around Britain and met people doing small things – or big ones. Like Cairngorms Connect – a 200-year rewilding project linking four landowners. Or the RSPB giving supplementary feed to turtle doves while lobbying Brussels to stop them being shot. The big work and the tiny gestures – both matter.

If you make a good conversation, make babies, make a pot, write a book – that’s balancing out the darker forces in the world. You remind yourself there are more good people than bad. If you want to find generosity, go find a poor person. If you want to solve the world’s problems, give women universal access to education. We know what works. We just don’t allow it.

Birds are resilient. They’ve survived ice ages, extinctions, continental drift. But they also remind us of the extraordinariness of the world we still inhabit. A world we’ve been gifted, and should care for. It’s not a resource. It’s not something to plunder. It’s something that, when we look after it, enriches us.

In the book I write a lot about bird names. Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” If you have more words, the world is bigger. Redstart. Chiffchaff. Merganser. Skylark. The names are beautiful. They make the world more textured, more alive.

This conversation took place in February 2025 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Birdland is available now from all major bookshops and online retailers.

So, What Now?

The ‘So What Now’ section is part of The Skylark’s mission to highlight partner organisations driving action on climate and nature. Interviewees are not affiliated with, nor do they necessarily endorse, these partners.