Under Their Wing: How Birds Shape the Human Experience

Description:

An evocative history charting just how intimately connected humans and birds have been since we first evolved out of the trees.

Birds and humans go back a long way - 350,000 years, by some estimates. During this long association, birds have integrated themselves into every facet of the human experience, from the dinner table to our mythologies to our colloquialisms and the language we use to understand the natural world. Spanning oceans, continents, and aeons, this book is prolific birder Pete Dunne's ode to our winged guides.

As the former director of the Cape May Bird Observatory and the founder of the World Series of Birding, Pete Dunne appreciates our enduring fascination with birds better than most. This elegantly composed book is both an inventory of our life with birds and an indictment of the destruction inflicted on their breeding grounds, food sources, and migratory pathways. It's a plea for us to remember our old respect for the avians we share this world with, and to do better for them.

This book not only celebrates birds but reveals how their surprising influences run like threads throughout human history. As Pete writes, ‘Were birds somehow excised from the human equation, we would hardly recognise ourselves’.