Birds have helped mankind throughout history — but we have repaid them cruelly

Unusually for a book about nature, the species in question, in this lucid story of the relationship between birds and humans, is ours. Why catch six million ibises, attractive water birds with curved beaks, plunge them into vats of liquid resin, wrap them in bandages and bury them in vast cemeteries in Middle Egypt in 650 BC?

When There Were Birds explains that these ibises were offerings to Thoth, god of knowledge and wisdom. Throughout this story, faith, cash and custom drive humans to behave in astonishing ways towards birds. From the early 15th century we were moving canaries to the Swiss Alps and southern Germany, where breeders might raise 50,000 birds a year, which were then transported and sold across the world. In 1871 America alone bought 48,000 as pets.

The late 19th century is a focus of the book, with clergy, scholars and journalists keeping records. The historians Roy and Lesley Adkins group their accounts thematically. Chapters on sickness and magic show us at our most cruel and absurd, burying live cockerels to cure epilepsy and applying the fundaments of pigeons to snake bites. But an evocative chapter, ‘Abundance’, assembles descriptions of a British landscape so vivid you feel you almost remember it. On Hickling Broad in Norfolk we see ‘about an acre and a half’ of coots, with Richard Lubbock, the 19th-century rector of Eccles. Near Ablington in the Cotswolds we watch lapwings with squire Arthur Gibbs:

Now flying in long drawn out lines, now in battalions; bowing here, bowing there. A thousand trained ballet dancers could not have been in better time. It was as if all joined hands, dressed in green and white; for at every turn a thousand white breasts gleamed in the purple sunset.