FEATURE


I found the photographs so enticing that I could have happily written about just the photographs on their own. David Tipple recalls: Over an eight year period, I travelled to 39 countries on seven continents, visiting remote tribal communities from the Amazon to Papua New Guinea. I’ve stood in awe at thousands of Snow Geese lifting off at dawn in New Mexico, been deafened by parrots arriving at the largest clay- lick in the heart of the Amazon, drunk vodka late into the night with Mongolian eagle hunters, and been privileged to photograph some of the finest antiquities in museums around the world. Mark Coker has been involved with writing about birds for over thirty years. This present volume is the equal of his magisterial Birds Britannica. However with this new work Cocker explains straightaway that the book ‘is as much about human beings as it is about birds.’ He has gone global and sought and obtained information from hundreds of bird people worldwide drawing on the contributions of over 650 correspondents in 81 countries. Could this information have been collected before email - I doubt it?


Before you enter the book proper the introduction is a tour de force. An essay of originality, deep knowledge and deep love.


The entire class of birds has occupied more of the earth’s surface, on terra firma and at sea, than any other vertebrate life form. Emperor penguins lay their eggs and incubate their chicks in the depth of the Arctic winter on thick beds of ice, enduring temperatures of -60 C◦. Their breeding colonies represent one of the extreme climatic outposts for all warm-blooded life on earth. Y


et birds


are not just ubiquitous upon our physical planet. They are fellow travellers of the human spirit and have also colonised our imagination, as if we were one further habitat to conquer and explore. Along with other species we can swim


and run but we cannot fly. Cocker puts it like this.


Birds often seem so much more intensely alive than we are. Birds walk the earth on two legs just as we do but then they perform something we never have. They rise up and they fly away. In so doing they unleash a special characteristic of their basic physiology, which supports the notion of their greater dynamism. On the significance of birds, Cocker says: Birds in the sky or birds flying over the waves offer us a way of comprehending and articulating two of our most fundamental but fundamentally inaccessible experiences: the passage of time and the interior workings of our imaginations.


BIRD SCENE 33


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