Review: 'Birds and Us,' by Tim Birkhead

"My aim in this book," Tim Birkhead writes in "Birds and Us," "is to share my enthusiasm for birds and to explain the varied ways that our relationships with them have changed through time."

He certainly accomplishes this, and does so in layperson's terms (for the most part), a lesson he learned when he once sent "a well-known television ornithologist" one of his scientific papers, of which the recipient understood not a word.

Birkhead, a Fellow of the Royal Society and professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Sheffield, writes accessibly so that more people will appreciate birds and empathize with them. As he especially did one "epiphanic" day when he "realized that the Common Guillemot I was watching on the ledge in front of me had recognized its partner several hundred metres away out at sea, when to me it seemed no more than a brown speck."

Beginning with "the deep cradle of Western ornithology," a shallow cave — Cueva del Tajo de las Figuras in Spain, the walls of which "are covered with an exuberant Neolithic frieze of over 200 birds" — Birkhead continues with explorations of how birds were viewed by humankind over the course of Western history.

These explorations cover the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, Medieval times, the Renaissance, the study of birds in the New World, a short fascinating history of the Faroe Islands and their dependence on birds for food, then on through Darwin and what Birkhead calls "The End of God in Birds." He concludes the book with discussions of the rise of modern bird-watching and ornithology coupled with what could be the "Third Mass Extinction."

Humans, over the ages, have seen birds as a link between the earthly and the spiritual, portraying them in religious art, and have wondered if they had the use of reason because some of them have the ability to mimic human speech. Humans have also slaughtered them for food, clothing and scientific research, although the latter has shifted to observation and tracking.

Birkhead enlivens his narrative with personal anecdotes and stories of significant figures in the history of ornithology. Especially compelling were the stories of Edmund Selous (1857-1934), who "made empathy for birds respectable and, in doing so, changed the world," and Oskar and Magdalena Heinroth, a married couple who studied birds at the Berlin Zoo and raised "thousands of young birds, often from the egg." Well, Magdalena did; Oskar observed and wrote the books.

Birkhead's discussion of Richard Dawkins' "the selfish gene" theory befuddled me, but overall the book is very accessible. In addition, 32 gorgeous color plates of paintings and photographs of birds make the book beautiful to peruse.

The bad news is "that as the number of people interested in birds has boomed, the numbers of birds has bombed," Birkhead laments. But he also notes that projects such as Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's eBird, a global database, are encouraging good news.

And his rich book surely helps the cause.

Frank Freeman is a writer in Saco, Maine.

Birds and Us

By: Tim Birkhead

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 496 pages, $35.