Birds And Us

Tim Birkhead Viking €35 ★★★★★

Birds are like colours and numbers: most of us have a favourite. Mine is the puffin (right), even though I have never seen one in the flesh. Such is the power that these marvels have over the human imagination, revealed by the naturalist Tim Birkhead in his beguiling and beautifully illustrated study Birds And Us.

Birkhead explores a 12,000-year history in which birds have affected our physical, emotional and spiritual lives. Those imprints are myriad, he explains, ranging from feeding pigeons in the park to training guns on birds for food or fun.

Birds have also captivated cloudgazing artists, from neolithic cave painters to JMW Turner and Edwin Landseer. Meanwhile, theologians have pondered the cuckoo’s character, ‘What kind of god designs a tiny chick that kills its foster siblings?’

Extraordinary details fly off the page, from how guillemot eggs refuse to harden when boiled, to the discovery of millions of mummified ibises in Egyptian catacombs. The avian characters are odd, but so too are the humans observing them: there are Renaissance scholars and innovative German zoologists, Victorian colonels with binoculars and Edwardian plumassiers turning feathers into fashion. It should come as no surprise, Birkhead explains, that birds should prove so captivating – their presence has hovered over our folklore for centuries. Birkhead is a personable, often amusing, guide. His own ornithological obsession began as a boy while reading Arthur Ransome; as a university lecturer, author and researcher, he has inspired subsequent generations. While his book focuses on appreciation and conservation, it is not hectoring. He is measured, even when detailing the Faroe Islands tradition of eating puffins with rhubarb. He accepts, however, that ‘to some non-Faroese people, the idea of eating a puffin is as repulsive as suggesting we eat a labradoodle’. I couldn’t agree more.