ornithology
The complexities of the dawn chorus
The habits of common or garden birds and their intricate songs prove even more fascinating than the puffins and guillemots of Adam Nicolson’s previous book
Butchered for feather beds: the brutal end of the great auk
The large, flightless birds that once inhabited the North Atlantic cliffs in their millions were extinct by the 1840s, as the demand for down-filled mattresses increased
Little dynamos of life
Over the course of one midsummer’s day, Mark Cocker presents a startling picture of the breeding, feeding, fledging and migrating habits of these little dynamos of life
Wings of desire
In 2014, an exhibition of watercolours by the renowned avian artist, John James Audubon, opened in New York. The reviews,…
Wind, sea and sky
Bird migration was once one of those unassailable mysteries that had baffled humankind since Aristotle. A strange hypothesis, genuinely advanced…
Will seagulls become as scary as Hitchcock’s The Birds?
Little Toller Books, in Dorset, aims to publish old and new writing on nature by the very best writers and…
The sacred chickens that ruled the roost in ancient Rome
Even the most cursory glance at the classical period reveals the central place that birds played in the religious and…
The most bizarre museum heist ever
They don’t look like a natural pair. First there’s the author, Kirk Wallace Johnson, a hero of America’s war in…
The swallows that herald spring
Sweet lovers, Shakespeare reminds us, love the spring. How can they not? All that wonderfully wanton colour, all that sensual…
Mozart’s mischievous muse
If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale,…
Raptor rapture
The fewer birds there are, the more books about them, particularly of the literary kind. Helen MacDonald’s H is for…
Diary
Down here in west Cornwall, the days are long and summer is on the wing. Like the Tories in Scotland,…
To Hell in a handcart — again
Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost…
A murder of crows
This book, with its absurdly uninformative photographs, dismal charts and smattering of charmless drawings, looks like a report. A pity,…
Soothing the savage breast
Is it the feathers that do the trick? The severely truculent expressions on their faces? Or is it their ancient…
Cats in feathers
Owls have more associations for us than perhaps any other family of birds, suggested Jeremy Mynott in Birdscapes, so it…
