A valuable footnote to this mighty story is Wings and Rings by Richard Vaughan, a onetime professor of medieval history but also a distinguished ornithologist, who provides a fascinating picture of how the study of bird migration began, centred round four remarkable men. Heinrich Gätke became the ‘uncrowned king’ of Heligoland, in the days when this tiny islet off the north German coast was a 19th-century British possession, for the expertise with which he classified the vast flocks of migrants which sought it as a refuge, often by shooting and stuffing them for sale. Hans Christian Mortensen was the Danish schoolteacher who around 1900 rendered this unnecessary by inventing ‘ringing’. Johannes Theinemann at the same time founded the world’s first proper bird observatory, still there on the major migration route of the Courland Spit, a 60-mile stretch of pine-clad Baltic coast. W. Eagle Clarke, in charge of natural history at the Edinburgh Museum, turned the lighthouse keepers of Britain into systematic record-keepers of the migrants attracted, often fatally, to their lights. Vaughan’s expert account will delight serious birdwatchers.

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