Here's a round-up of recent bird books, my latest contribution to Literary Review (where it appears on slightly different form). As ever, I urge you to buy the magazine – it's simply the best...
Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea
By Matt Ridley
(4th Estate 340pp £25)
Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood
By Adam Nicolson
(Collins 448pp £22)
The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife
By Tim Birkhead
(Bloomsbury Sigma 288pp £20)
Here are three very different books about birds by three of our finest writers on nature and science.
Matt Ridley’s is the most ambitious and wide-ranging, exploring the implications of ‘Charles Darwin’s strangest idea’ – that evolution is driven not only by natural selection but also by sexual selection. It’s an idea that has faced opposition from Darwin’s time down to our own, perhaps because it involves female choice, perhaps because it seems to dilute the purity of the all-embracing theory of natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace dismissed it entirely, and it was attacked by generations of naturalists ever after, but for Darwin himself, after The Origin of Species, it was a subject of much more interest than natural selection, which, as Ridley points out, takes a back seat in The Descent of Man.
Birds, Sex and Beauty begins before dawn somewhere on the Pennines, where the author is watching the extraordinary spectacle of a black grouse lek, a loud and lively gathering of male birds who, for eight months of the year, gather daily to strut their stuff, displaying their spectacular black, white and red plumage and scrapping with each other. Most of the time, this goes on in the total absence of females, but when the hens do arrive one cock will eventually get nearly all the sex, enjoying his two seconds of ecstasy with a succession of eager hens. Why, asks Ridley, do the male birds go to such bizarre, exhausting lengths? And why do their displays, like those of many other birds, notably peacocks and birds of paradise, seem beautiful to us (and, presumably, to susceptible hen birds)? What is going on in a black grouse lek is not an Arthurian tournament where the victor in combat wins the favour of the fair damsel, though that mistaken idea dies hard: Ridley calls out David Attenborough himself for promulgating it. Fights on the lek are not serious, and winners gain no status. No, something else is going on – something to do with beauty, something that has implications far beyond the world of birds.
Female choice has triggered ‘runaway’ effects in male plumage and display, a circular process whereby ‘taste for beauty creates beauty which creates taste for beauty’. And female choice has done much more than that, as the heading of one of Ridley’s chapters suggests: ‘How Mate Choice Shaped the Human Mind’. The phenomenal growth of the human brain and human abilities might well have served the aim of seduction, and art could be seen as a ‘sexual display signalling system’. The line between instinct and culture, nature and nurture is blurred when culture can drive genetic change. Ridley’s book – written with a pleasingly light touch, larded with literary quotations (more beauty) and illustrated with excellent colour photographs – is illuminating, incisive and a pleasure to read.
Every bit as enjoyable is Bird School, in which Adam Nicolson embarks on ‘an attempt to encounter birds, to engage with a whole and marvellous layer of life that I had lived with in a kind of blindness and deafness for decades’. He claims that ‘I had never paid much attention to birds’ – except, of course, seabirds, about which he wrote the classic The Seabird’s Cry. On land – on his own land, the Sussex farm on which he lives – he sets about immersing himself in its bird life by building a rather wonderful hide, a hexagonal shed on stilts, built to be accommodating to birds as well as humans, and placed in the midst of the birds’ world, on the margin of a wood and a field. Here he observes what is going on and writes about it, with typical elegance and rich descriptive power, focusing in each chapter on one bird and the theme it embodies – ‘Wrens: Surviving’, ‘Songbirds: Proclaiming’, ‘Robins: Occupying’, etc.
This is a fruitful approach, enabling Nicolson to move easily between the particular and the general. In the chapter on songbirds, for example, he listens to a blackbird heralding the start of the dawn chorus, tells how a songbird identification app has transformed his relationship with birds, discovers that the order in which birds start singing is dictated by eye size (the bigger the eye, the earlier the start), describes the effects of light and sound pollution on birdsong, and ponders the various reasons why birds greet the day with song. And sex rears its Darwinian head again: Nicolson cites research that found that ‘starting early was sexy for blue tits’, as it demonstrates experience and virility.
Bird School is a pleasing blend of lyrical description, exploratory thought, first-hand experience, research findings, and references to literature and music. Nicolson writes beautifully, with infectious joy in his subject, and the book flows effortlessly along. It ends with a chapter in which he ponders the subject of rewilding, and describes his own plans for his farm – not rewilding but what he calls ‘reculturing’, a kind of mending of the landscape, allowing ‘the ancient connection between human use and animal and plant life to re-establish themselves’ in patterns what were lost in the century of intensive agriculture. After the final chapter comes a ‘roll-call’ of the birds on Nicolson’s patch, vivid verbal sketches of each bird, with the basic facts of its life.
The Great Auk by Tim Birkhead, author of that wonderful book on birds’ eggs, The Most Perfect Thing, tells the story of a truly iconic bird, the large, flightless northern seabird that became extinct before the 19th century was half over. As the subtitle says, the great auk’s life was indeed extraordinary, its death hideous, and its afterlife mysterious. A bird that was revered and totemic in the deep past, it became the first species to be driven to extinction by human activity – wholesale slaughter, which began as soon as Europeans first happened upon the bird in its huge, wholly defenceless island colonies. Now all that remains of it is in the form of ornithological relics – eggs, skins, stuffed specimens and bones, all of which command sky-high prices if they come on the market.
Birkhead’s book begins with a chapter titled Funk Heaven, imagining the life of a great auk colony on Funk Island, off Newfoundland. Then, sadly, comes Funk Hell, beginning with the appearance of the first European explorers and developing into a terrible tale of carnage.
Later, long after the poor bird’s extinction, the story is largely one of obsessive collectors fighting over great auk relics, especially the eggs, several of which have gone mysteriously missing. Birkhead introduces the extraordinary figure of Vivian Hewitt, one-time playboy and aviator, who ended up living in seclusion in Cornwall with the ‘housekeeper’ whose four children he may well have fathered himself. He also became an obsessive egg collector, at one time owning 13 of the surviving great auk eggs. Hewitt is the dominant personality in a rogues’ gallery of strange, driven collectors who feature in this fascinating page-turner of a book. And, interestingly, Birkhead suggests that Darwin could have used extreme collecting ‘as a metaphor for sexual selection’. So there we are – back to sex again.
