A sweeping and lyrical history of the relationship between birdlife and humankind over twelve millennia, exploring how birds have captured our imaginations and inspired our culture and our science.
In Birds and Us award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on an epic and dazzling journey through our mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to Renaissance experiments on woodpecker anatomy, from Victorian obsessions with egg collecting to the present fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats.
Weaving in stories from his own life as a scientist, including far-flung expeditions to Neolithic caves in Spain and the guillemot colonies of the Faroe Islands, this ambitious book is the culmination of a lifetime's research and unforgettably demonstrates how birds shaped us, and how we have shaped them.
About the Author
Tim Birkhead is a professor at the University of Sheffield where he teaches animal behaviour and the history of science.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and his research has taken him all over the world in the quest to understand the lives of birds. He has written for The Independent, New Scientist, BBC Wildlife.
Among his other books are Promiscuity, Great Auk Islands, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Birds which won the McColvin medal and The Red Canary which won the Consul Cremer Prize.
He is married with three children and lives in Sheffield.