Talking about the birds and the bees

Were I swimming for my life with these four books between my teeth and were I to be tried more sorely, the first to go would be Parrot. It has three gems: that Warren Hastings, who died (from starvation) in 1818, owned a parrot that was still alive in Swindon in the 1920s; that Charlotte, George V’s parrot, would perch on his shoulder and in a ‘strident, seafaring voice’ call out, ‘Well, what about it?’ as the monarch deliberated over state documents; and that in Australian slang tight male swimming briefs are known as ‘budgie smugglers’. But these are insufficient rewards for trawling through Paul Carter’s unfocused and matey prose. Too often his meaning eluded me. And his style verges on the cute. One picture caption reads, ‘A jolly Persian lass and her amusing Polly’.

Next would be Bee, despite that it’s easily the best of several recent bee books. Claire Preston is widely read and presents her information cogently and attractively. Especially fascinating is her chapter ‘Bee Movie’, which relates advances in microscopy and the spread in the 1950s of the so-called killer bee from Brazil to an entire genre of horror films in the US. The demonisation of the bee bears comparison to that of the louse in pre-first-world-war Germany (which was later to be directed explicitly against the Jews), and of the rat (see below). Bee is excellent. I enjoyed every page of it. But Falcon and Rat are more so, and two’s enough for a poor swimmer.

‘In 1998 Ken Franklin trained a young female peregrine falcon called Frightful to follow a free-falling, speed-suited skydiver out of an aircraft door at 16,000 feet.’ Thus starts Falcon. Opposite is a sensational photograph of Frightful in a vertical dive. Together they set the tone of this marvellous book, which comes as sheer joy after the crabbing and tendentious stuff the RSPB dishes out.