Meet the Flockers -a soap opera of love, life and eggs

After fourteen years of garden chicken keeping Martin Gurdon thought adding some ducks and doves to his flock would be harmless fun. He didn't realise what he was letting himself in for.

Garden chicken and bird keeping has never been more popular, there are plenty of practical books that show you how, but this one reveals the often-bizarre, sometimes moving but always hilarious reality.

Charting the seasonal highs and lows in a year of an amateur domestic bird owner and his flock, Doing Bird introduces you to a world filled with ducks who think they're chickens, a hen called Ann Summers, invading foxes, rabbits and builders, vast vet bills, doves needing parenting classes and Bombay, the drake with an unrequited love for Bella the chicken.

This is a fowl story of a man, a woman and a load of feathery trouble.