https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691239927/birds-and-us

Tim Birkhead

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 sparked our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art and philosophy. We worshiped birds as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves with their feathers, studied their wings to plan their 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 shared history with birds, from the mummified and deified ibises of the ancient Egyptians to the Renaissance fascination with the anatomy of woodpeckers, and the Victorian obsession with birds. from 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. In the 20th century, the book tells the story of the emergence of bird watching and field study of birds, and how they sparked an extraordinary flowering of knowledge and empathy for birds, leading ultimately to today's massive global interest in birds – and awareness. of the urgency of saving them.

Weaving stories from Birkhead's life as a scientist, including far-flung expeditions to wondrous Neolithic caves in Spain and the bustling murre colonies of the Faroe Islands, this rich and fascinating book is an unforgettable account of how the birds shaped us and how we shaped them.

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