Wings of desire: why birds captivate us
Our affections for wild animals are distributed very unevenly. Take insects. Some 750,000 species have already been documented worldwide and the great American naturalist EO Wilson called them "the little things that run the world". Through their recycling of nutrients and the supply of base-level protein to a vast array of higher life forms, insects underpin the existence of life on this planet. Yet when it comes to human concern for creepy-crawlies, forget it.
BugLife is Britain's most important invertebrate conservation organisation. Yet Matt Shardlow, its director, recently lamented: "We have a membership of about 1,000, and we are responsible for 40,000 species." Compare those figures with the statistics for theRoyal Society for the Protection of Birds, which today claims 1.3 million members, substantially more than the members of all the UK political parties combined. It tends to the welfare of 250 bird species.
What is it about creatures with feathers that so captivates us? It's certainly not just a modern love affair: Aldous Huxley once claimed that if you took the avifauna out of English verse you would have to dispose of half the poetic canon. It is also wrong to think of it as a purely British phenomenon, although we do seem to be among the more bird-obsessed nations.
There are apparently more than 50 million proper birdwatchers in the US, with three times as many people feeding the feathered visitors to their gardens, creating a national bird-food industry worth $1bn. Through these backyard encounters, birds often function as the central ambassadors in the relationship between people and nature.
In 2005, having finished my book Birds Britannica, which examines Britain's relationship with its island avifauna, I conceived the idea of exploring how and where such ornitho-passions are replicated worldwide. There are roughly 10,500 bird species on Earth, giving rise to a tangle of connections between humans and birds that is rainforest-like in its size and complexity. These range from the chillingly clinical processes of the industrialised chicken unit, to the song and dance ceremonies of the Papuan highlands, with their bird-of-paradise feather displays. The aim of my project was to document as many of these connections as possible. After seven years, Birds and People has now been published.
I wonder at times whether our preoccupation with birds stems from the sheer variety of functional applications into which we have pressed their various body parts. Almost everything that the creatures could yield, from the breast down of sea duck (eider down), and the saliva-composed nests of swiftlets (bird's-nest soup) to the webbed feet of the albatross (tobacco pouches) or the thick fibrous skins of penguins (golf gloves) has been exploited at one time or another.
The chicken is undoubtedly now the most economically important species, supplying us with more protein than cattle, pigs, sheep or goats. In the last decade our annual global consumption was 90m tonnes of meat and 57m tonnes of eggs. The British alone eat 26m eggs a day.
To this we can add an array of more exotic purposes. The Inuit still make rattles from puffin beaks. In the Santa Cruz islands near Samoa they use the scarlet plumes from a gorgeous little scrap called the cardinal myzomela to make carpet-like scrolls of red cloth that once functioned as money. Ortolans are much loved by the French after the buntings have been fattened on oatmeal and drowned in armagnac (the tiny lungs then supply a "liqueur-scented flower of taste" for the epicure diner). The number of ortolans has now declined dramatically but they are still served illegally in certain swanky French restaurants at around €2,000 a kilo... read more:
