Founder, Wild Bird Post
I write the Wild Bird Post letters, choose the plates that travel inside them, and run the desk in Co. Louth where every envelope is folded, sealed and posted by hand. I also run Ask About Birds and Birds & Wetlands, two print houses making fine-art bird plates in the tradition of the old natural history illustrators.
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.
Maebh, Co. Louth
The letters started from the same place the print houses did: a long interest in the way the old natural history illustrators looked at birds, and in what happens when you slow down enough to look the same way. Ask About Birds and Birds & Wetlands sell those plates one at a time. Wild Bird Post sends one a month, inside a letter that says where the bird was, what the weather was doing and why it was drawn the way it was.
Every letter starts with research, not writing: which bird, which story about it actually holds up rather than merely gets repeated, and what the season was really doing in that place. I draft it longhand first, the way people wrote to each other for a couple of centuries, because a letter composed straight into a keyboard tends to read like an email that got long. Only once the handwriting is finished does it move to a keyboard to be tightened and checked. Every letter also carries a few real lines of poetry about that particular bird - always by a poet safely out of copyright, always credited by name, never invented and never quoted at length from anyone still protected by it.
The plate that travels inside each letter comes from the Ask About Birds fine-art collection: a museum-quality print, in the Audubon tradition, printed edge to edge on archival paper, no border and no mat, made for a frame rather than a folder. Letter, plate, field note and keepsake are folded, sealed and addressed by hand at one desk in Co. Louth, then walked to An Post in person on the first Tuesday of every month.
Every historical and scientific claim in a letter or a post is sourced. If it has not been verified, it is not published as fact.
Any price quoted for another subscription box, in a comparison post or page, carries the date it was checked, because prices move and a stale number is worse than none.
Wild Bird Post's commercial interest is disclosed on every page that compares us to a named competitor - we sell this, so we say so, and we say where a rival is genuinely the better fit.
No review, star rating or testimonial appears anywhere on this site until a real subscriber gives one. Until then, the proof is the complete specimen letter, readable free on the letters page.
Josiah Rook and Clara Vandegrift are inventions. The world around them is not: the birds, the places, the weather and the historical detail in a letter are drawn from real 1830s American natural history, checked before they are written rather than assumed. Where something has been simplified for the sake of the story, I try to make that obvious rather than let it pass as fact. Where the history ends and Josiah's fiction begins is stated plainly on the story page and about the naturalist, and inside the letters themselves - never left for a reader to have to guess.
Questions about a letter, a plate, or anything on this site are welcome at hello@wildbirdpost.com.
Letter No. 0 is on the site in full, with its plate and its poem, exactly as it arrives.
