Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History from Cave Art to Conservation

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars | 80 ratings

Price: 23.89

Last update: 12-12-2024


About this item

This audiobook narrated by acclaimed ornithologist Tim Birkhead traces the 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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.


Top reviews from the United States

Jehoshephat
3.0 out of 5 stars constantly shifting and all over the place
Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2022
The parts of the books specifically about birds (anatomy, habits, locales, etc.) are clearly written and absolutely fascinating. Unfortunately -- for me, anyway -- the author casts an extremely wide net in every other aspect, in what the subtitle calls "a 12,000-year history from cave art to conservation". All this in less than 350 pages of a medium-sized font of easy-to-read print. I got very frustrated at the frequent and fairly extensive excursions into human history, religion, the history of medicine, snarky comments about Christianity (I'm not a believer myself, but didn't see any real reason for these), and a great deal about the author himself. One possible reason for side trips into history is that the author apparently assumes no historical knowledge whatsoever on the readers' part, so a good deal of this (presumably to keep the page-count manageable) is very superficial, and doesn't really help us understand the actual attitude toward or treatment of birds at any given particular point. Good references in the text to the beautiful color plates would have been helpful, and I'd have appreciated more pencil drawings in the text itself. This would have been preferable to the over-general observations about non-bird matters. There's a terrific book about birds and us in here, but I had to search through too much secondary (or tertiary) expositions to find it.
JJo
5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful gift
Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2022
Gave it as a gift to a lifetime birder. New take on an interesting subject. Worth investigating

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