Birds and Us by Tim Birkhead

This is an expansive look at man's interactions with birds, written by an academic ornithologist. It opens with a visit to Cueva del Tajo de las Figuras, located in Andalusia, Spain and the Neolithic bird paintings on its walls. This is an 8,000-year old depiction of flamingos, herons, raptors, avocets and many other species. Birkhead recounts the story of how the cave was discovered in the early 20th-century and then Abbé Henri Breuilsummarizes academics’ efforts to identify the 208 birds on the cave wall--I really enjoy these ancient cave paintings, and it was a good place to start from my perspective. Each chapters focuses on a chronological era and sometimes a place, through the details within often jump around in time and space. There’s the Neolithic era; Ancient Egypt; Ancient Greece and Rome (Aristotle liked birds, as did Pliny and Plutarch); Medieval times (mostly falconry); the Renaissance; the groundbreaking classification work of Francis Willughby and John Ray in the late Renaissance; the seabirds of the Faroe Islands (an essay on the interaction between puffins, murres, fulmars and the people who kill and eat them, a delicate balance first observed by a Danish priest in the mid-17th-century); the 19th-century ideological explosion that followed the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species ; the Victorian Era’s obsession with the collecting of bird skins and eggs ; the development of field-based ornithological research in Europe and Great Britain; a quick step back through the history to look at bird protection, conservation, and our precarious future, with a focus on Birkhead’s long-term Common Guillemot research at Skomer Island, Wales (which he has written about a number of times before). It is scattershot but interesting, and he is a reasonable storyteller, so it is a good way to learn more about birds if you are so inclined.