In-flight entertainment
This book weighs in at approximately the same as a familysized Christmas turkey. It’s unusual to find a book of this proportion and even more unusual to find a bird book that’s so much about people — and not, to quote author Mark Cocker, “an environmental lament”.
“A world without birds,” he says, “would lay waste the human heart” and in these 600 pages he sets out to prove it.
By way of structure, he’s broken down the world’s roughly 10 500 bird species into around 200 families. The families deemed less “culturally important” have simply been listed in an appendix, leaving Cocker to concentrate on the other 144 very extended families — as well as the two that are now extinct, the elephant birds of Madagascar and the moas of New Zealand.
There’s no alphabetical order in Birds , no real starting or finishing point. Noting in the introduction that the biggest source of human protein is the Red Junglefowl — technically a member of the Galliformes group, which includes pheasant, fowl, turkey, quail, grouse etc — I turned to that chapter to find “the longest species account in the book” on what is commonly called the chicken. In its abundance (around 12 billion, almost two birds to each human), this bird has “helped shape civilisation”.
Likewise, the plumage of exotic species seems to have inspired whole cultures.
“Parrot body parts are still an important element in Amerindian ceremonial costume,” we are told. And “in the 19th century, bird feathers were so sought after that the lacy plumes on a great egret were worth twice their weight in gold.”
But nowhere more than here in Africa have feathers been a symbol of splendour. A picture of a proud Masai warrior, his face framed in ostrich plumes, says it all.
The book is spattered with quotes and images by authors, artists and designers. Who could forget the Guinness Toucan? Or Sylvia Plath’s reference to the male organ as a “turkey neck”?
The closing credit must go to photographer David Tipling, who was responsible for most of the visuals.
“Over an eight year period,” he writes, “I travelled to 30 countries on seven continents … I’ve stood in awe at thousands of Snow Geese lifting off at dawn in New Mexico, been deafened by parrots arriving at the world’s largest clay lick … drunk vodka late into the night with Mongolian eagle hunters …”
It’s a picture of these fur-coated drinking companions, on horseback in a frozen landscape, hook-beaked eagles on their leathered arms, that graces the cover of this extraordinary book. —