Bird Is the World

MANY OF US take enough interest in birds to put out food for them in the garden and to enjoy spotting them on a country walk. But if you go for a walk with a real birder, you soon realize that what you took to be a place adapted by humans for their own use, with a few feathered creatures flying out of your way, is actually also a bird-world, whose many varieties of inhabitants are going about their business with the frenetic concentration of hedge-fund dealers. Professor Tim Birkhead, author of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Ornithology, is a birder of birders, and his new book, as its title implies, is an ambitious attempt to get inside birds’ heads—to chart what we know of their senses, and even to some extent their emotions, and to understand how they perceive the world.