Birds & People, by Mark Cocker – review

‘A world without birds would lay waste the human heart,’ writes Mark Cocker. Following his Birds Britannica and prize-winning Crow Country, in Birds & People he embraces the planet, with the help of the wildlife photographer, David Tipling, and the ‘650 contributors from 81 countries’ to whom the book is dedicated. He begins his cultural celebration of the earth’s 200 recognised bird families with one of ‘the most primitive’, the partridge-like tinamou from South America. Tinamou are loth to fly, not surprisingly since once airborne they tend fatally to crash into things, even houses.

A near relative is the completely flightless common ostrich, the largest surviving bird. The ubiquity of ostrich eggs is explained by the size of the clutch, 78 a record. Only today in Africa is glass replacing ostrich eggshell as a staple of jewellery. The eggs have been used as water containers and in sacred art — as recently as 1980 15,500 were required by the Ethiopian Coptic Church.

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Birds and art are immemorially entwined. There is a 30,000-year-old owl image in the Chauvet Cave in southern France; and a painting on a prepared surface of a vulture from 6,000 BC at Catalhoyuk, southern Turkey. The supreme bird culture in ancient times was Egypt’s, exemplified by its reverence of the sacred ibis, so called to this day. The bird’s white plumage and the new moon curve of its beak seem to explain why it was sacred to Thoth, the lunar deity. Cocker warns us against mocking such cults. In the USA 300 million turkeys are offered up annually every Thanksgiving and Christmas. And how many wish-bones do we pull? Wild sacred ibis were protected by order of the Pharaoh, perhaps the first example of conservation legislation.