Birds and Us
A 12,000-Year History from Cave Art to Conservation
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
From award-winning author and ornithologist Tim Birkhead, a sweeping history of the long and close relationship between birds and humans
Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art, and philosophy. We have worshipped birds as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves with their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight, and, more recently, attempted to protect them. In Birds and Us, award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on a dazzling epic journey through our mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to the Renaissance fascination with woodpecker anatomy—and from the Victorian obsession with egg collecting to today’s fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats.
Spanning continents and millennia, Birds and Us chronicles the beginnings of a written history of birds in ancient Greece and Rome, the obsession with falconry in the Middle Ages, and the development of ornithological science. Moving to the twentieth century, the book tells the story of the emergence of birdwatching and the field study of birds, and how they triggered an extraordinary flowering of knowledge and empathy for birds, eventually leading to today’s massive worldwide interest in birds—and the realization of the urgent need to save them.
Weaving in stories from Birkhead’s life as scientist, including far-flung expeditions to wondrous Neolithic caves in Spain and the bustling guillemot colonies of the Faroe Islands, this rich and fascinating book is an unforgettable account of how birds have shaped us, and how we have shaped them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ornithologist Birkhead (Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird) delivers a master class in this fascinating look at humans' evolving relationship with birds, tracking over the course of 12 millennia as birds went from being the objects of art and veneration to sources of food and sport, and the current subject of study and conservation. In ancient Egypt, for example, four million Sacred Ibises were mummified, then found in the early 1800s: "bird mummies served four different purposes: preserving the birds as food, as pets for deceased humans, as gods to be revered and as votive offerings." Other sections delve into the medieval obsession with falconry, the study of birds' biology during a natural history boom in the Victorian era, and contemporary bird-dependent societies on the Faroe Islands. Portraits of key players in ornithology enrich the narrative, among them Edmund Selous, who near the end of the 19th century led the shift from killing birds for study to bird-watching as a serious intellectual pursuit, an activity that garnered empathy for the creatures. Birkhead clearly knows his terrain, and his writing is vivid and occasionally funny: "There's also the ammonia-rich aroma of sea-bird shit (which I love, by the way)." This is a must-read for nature lovers.
