Where did birds first learn to sing?

The crisis inflicted by Covid-19 has been a source of anguish for everyone; yet we frequently hear how people are rediscovering solace in nature, especially in their gardens or in the surging renewal of life in the spring. According to Tim Burt and Des Thompson, the editors of a collection of essays about the importance of field research, this fulfilment reveals something much more profound than a distraction from lockdown.They argue that a response to the natural world is hardwired in the human psyche. Out of that fundamental reflex has evolved not just our prowess as hunters, then agriculturalists, but the entire edifice of science, whose assembled vision of the physical universe was described by C.P. Snow as ‘the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man’.

Curious About Nature provides a glorious overview of how those scientific accomplishments were achieved. Here, in précis, is the whole history of fieldwork, from pioneering ancients such as Aristotle, Pliny and Ptolemy, via champions of the Enlightenment — Carl Linnaeus and Alexander von Humboldt — to such giants of modern environmentalism as Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall.