A love worth earning. A world worth knowing.
Follow Josiah Rook, field collector and bird artist, from the warm southern swamps to the northern seas, chasing beauty, science, and a future worth returning home to.
Twelve letters. Twelve months. One journey.
You are there with him. In every letter.
Josiah Rook sets out to draw the birds of America in spring 1832. Clara Vandegrift keeps the ledger at home in Bordentown: the printers, the paper, the list of subscribers. Her father has named one impossible condition, so Josiah writes to her every month from the road. AI dramatisation of original historical fiction.
The Naturalist
Thirty-eight, born in Bristol, Pennsylvania, setting out from Bordentown, New Jersey in the spring of 1832. Capable, broke, observant, slightly weathered, and always a season behind the famous men. He collects skins and sketches and sells them on, which is why history never heard of him. He means to change that with a book of American birds published by subscription rather than patronage.
The Correspondent
Thirty, of Bordentown. She is not the woman waiting at the window. She runs the home office of the publication: the subscriber ledger, the instalments, the printers, the paper samples, the engraving estimates, the plates promised against the plates finished. She does not write poetry. She underlines figures. When she is worried she becomes more formal, and when she is angry she becomes perfectly polite.
They are courting. Her letters are never reproduced, so you know her only through what he answers, which is a great deal more than he means to tell you.
Cornelis Vandegrift is Bordentown old money, shipping and land and chapel on Sunday, and the uncomfortable thing about him is that he is right on the facts. Collecting was not a living. Most naturalists of that generation died poor. So instead of a flat wall he set one condition with a twelve-month clock on it, and Josiah said nothing at the gate and left.
What the condition is stays in the letters. It is arithmetic the reader tracks silently from March to February, and printing it here would spend it.
He leaves with a chest, a debt and a subscriber list far shorter than it needs to be. Twelve chapters, place by place: Bordentown, Charleston, Florida, the swamps, north along the seaboard, the Bay of Fundy, the crossing, Labrador, the return, the interior, the night of stars, and home.
One bird carries each month. Which one stays sealed until that letter is in the post, because a letter you already know the ending of is not a letter. Month one is the Eastern Bluebird, in the orchard before the thaw.
12 Letters
Twelve months of the journey
12 Places
From the southern swamps to the northern seas
12 Birds
Studied, sketched and described
One Story
A love story told in real time
An 1830s man courting an unmarried woman cannot write down most of what he means. Period restraint does the work that a modern love story would do with a conversation, and it is the mechanism the whole series runs on: he writes her two sides about a bird, and lets her make of that what she will.
It only works one month at a time, at the speed of the post. Twelve letters tell one finished story, and then it ends. That is a promise as much as a plot: nothing here runs on until you remember to stop it.
Twelve letters over twelve months,with an ending that lands.
Delivered Monthly
Posted the first Tuesday, beautifully packaged, straight to your door.
Inspired by History
Set in 1832, alongside the real events and figures of the Audubon era.
Made to be Kept
Archival stock, flat in a rigid mailer. Every piece is made to last.
My name is Maebh Collins. I live in Co. Louth, on Ireland’s east coast, and I have spent the last few years running Ask About Birds, a small print house making fine-art bird plates in the tradition of the old natural history illustrators.
Wild Bird Post started at my own letterbox. The walk down the drive had become a chore. Bills, flyers, a menu for a takeaway that closed last year. The only good post I could remember was a letter from my mother, years old now, still in the kitchen drawer. I wanted to make the thing I would want to receive: something on paper, made slowly, that asks nothing of you except that you open it.
I write the letters in his voice. Longhand first, then set in type, with the sketches and the weather notes in the margins where he would have put them. Two sides, one bird, no padding. They are folded, sealed and stamped at one desk here, and posted through An Post on the first Tuesday of the month.
Josiah Rook and Clara Vandegrift are inventions. The birds are not, the road is not, and the year is not: 1832 is a real year with real weather, real steamboats, real postage rates and real people in it, and where a letter leans on history it says so and cites where it came from.
With love, Maebh · Co. Louth, Ireland
More about the writer and how these are made
Letter No. 0 is on the site in full, free, with its plate and its poem. Read it, and if it sounds like something you would want turning up, you can choose a monthly or prepaid subscription.
