As soon as the British had pretty much done for their larger mammals, they took up birds. The ones you shoot or eat had been protected from time immemorial, and in the 1880s people began to look after the ones that it was just nice to have around. Parliament began passing protective laws, lobbied by the forerunner of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which now claims a million members and owns vast tracts of land. The publishing business followed the action; the shelves in rustic bourgeois households like mine are bent down with bird books, which have to earn their shelf-space.

The fattest fledgling in this new nestful demands not a shelf but a sturdy coffee-table. The defective grammar of its title, Birds Britannica, occurs because its original begetter, Richard Mabey, wrote a fine book called Flora Britannica, and thus established what one must call a brand. When Mabey fell ill (this year he published another fine book, Nature Cure, about his recovery) Mark Cocker picked up the pieces, tried to follow the pattern, and managed fairly well.

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