Wonder of Birds

Wonder of Birds is running at The Treasury, Weston Library on Broad Street, and it's one of those exhibitions that takes a long time to really work through. It's curated by Antonia Harrison, in association with Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Books, and takes its cue from The Book of Birds, the third collaboration between artist Jackie Morris and writer Robert Macfarlane, who previously worked together on The Lost Words and The Lost Spells.

The whole thing is built around seven 'wonders' of birds: nest, egg, beak, song, feather, flight and migration. Around those, it pulls together a huge range of material. You'll find John Gould's Birds of Great Britain and John James Audubon's Birds of America, alongside glass-plate negatives by Emma Louisa Turner that have never been shown before. There's the Keartons' British Birds' Nests, and John Buxton's birdwatching diary, which he wrote while a prisoner of war at Oflag VIIB. On the literary side, it runs from Maya Angelou's Caged Bird to Percy Bysshe Shelley's own handwritten annotations for To a Skylark. Sound artist and nature beatboxer Jason Singh has provided an original soundscape, and the artist duo Daniel & Clara have contributed their Rewilding Imagination field guide: Birds.

It's not all just the beauty of it, though. The exhibition looks at the darker side of our relationship with birds — Victorian feather fashions, egg collecting and caged songbirds — and balances that against conservation successes like white-tailed eagles and ospreys returning to Britain. It focuses on 49 species currently on Britain's amber or red conservation lists, with a surviving Great Auk egg on loan from Oxford's Natural History Museum and George Edwards's 1760 illustration of the dodo acting as emotional centrepieces.

It's open from 2 May 2026 to 3 January 2027 at The Treasury, Weston Library, Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BG. Admission is free and you don't need a ticket, so you can just turn up whenever suits you.