Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience

"Jeremy is a classicist but has always been interested in birds and he distilled his thinking about birds to produce this wonderful book. He explores the myriad reasons why people are so engaged with birds. It’s like walking with a very erudite but very passionate and interesting man, strolling through lots of different landscapes. He starts the book in Russia, then Suffolk, the Scilly Isles and so on. The ground he covers is immense. You feel you are having a conversation with an incredibly interesting travelling companion. His references range from Aristotle and Keats to Puccini to the Monty Python parrot sketch. Typically for Jeremy he couldn’t stop himself putting in a footnote about a Danish fossil parrot! It’s a fabulous book. I’d recommend it not only to anyone interested in birds but also for anyone who has a husband, wife, son or daughter who’s nuts about birds and can’t understand why. This will tell them. Aristotle said a lot about birds. Many of the Ancient Greeks wrote about birds and, of course, you know about their prognostications of the future using birds as omens. In fact, the Greek word for ‘bird’, ornis , was also their word for ‘an omen’. It’s interesting how much birds still enter our lives in common vocabulary and expressions: for instance, larking about, eagle-eyed, cocksure, swanning around, being gullible and so on. I often write about why birds capture our imagination so much. I think the primary thing about birds is that we envy their ability to soar off a cliff or migrate from one end of the world to the other – their ability to fly. But more than that, they have so much going for them. They are ubiquitous in a way that mammals aren’t. It’s extraordinary how so many television programmes focus on mammals. We do love mammals – we are mammals ourselves, of course – but they are very hard to see. Most of them are nocturnal. It’s easy to see rabbits and deer, but they’re not brightly coloured. Mammals often just skulk and are harder to observe but birds have an immense interaction with our eyes. You can watch birds anywhere. If you just look up there are plenty of birds, even in inner London where I live. It’s a bit grey here but right now I can see a wood pigeon perched on a TV aerial, and a flock of starlings flying past. I see sparrowhawks here, I see terns in summer, I see herons, woodpeckers, cormorants, gulls. People who don’t watch birds call gulls seagulls but birders always call them gulls. They are still associated with coasts but many have taken to living far inland over the past 100 or so years – black-headed gulls following the plough are a common sight in farmland, while in our big cities, including London, they are commonly fighting for scraps of bread in parks and gardens or visiting rubbish dumps, along with the bigger herring gulls and lesser black-backed gulls."