MARK COCKER’S ENJOYABLE encyclopaedia, Birds Britannica, surveys the ways in which birds have invaded man’s world, and the ways in which human beings have in turn invaded theirs.

Birds were already there, of course, when we arrived on the planet, and they were quick to adapt on a large scale to the new habitats, such as settlements and farmland, that we created. But what Cocker’s book especially regales us with is their small-scale ingenuities when pursuing their only two interests in life, breeding and feeding.

One of the oldest stories here concerns a robin that in 1796 built its nest in the skull of a man hanged for highway robbery. You could hardly penetrate further into man’s world than that! Robins have also nested in an unmade bed when its owner was having breakfast, while wrens (who seem to like smelly nest-sites) have built in the folds of a tramp’s old shirt draped on a bush, and in the mouth of a prize pike hanging on a garage wall.

As for feeding, we have all heard of blue tits that used to open milk-bottles on doorsteps to get at the cream. But they were even cleverer than that. Birds, oddly enough, can digest cream but not milk — and the tits stopped coming when people started buying semi-skimmed milk without any cream on top.

But birds have invaded man’s life in another, and perhaps more important way. They have invaded his imagination. Again, Cocker’s book does not dwell on such things as the well-known classical bird myths, but offers us numerous examples of ways in which people have taken birds into their everyday thoughts.

One of these ways is simply by giving them names. Collared doves colonised Western Europe only 50 years ago. Now the Germans call them television doves because they sing from TV aerials, while an Essex vicar calls them “the Evostik bird” because he thinks their call sounds like that. The name has caught on in his parish.

A glaucous gull, which is a rare bird, came to Cley in Norfolk every winter for 16 years, and the birders named it “George”. After it vanished, another glaucous gull started coming, which they called “Boy George”.

However, birds can haunt our imagination in a deeper way than this. Naming birds may humanise them, but as Cocker observes, their very inhumanity is part of their fascination — the fact that they live lives so wonderfully indifferent to our preoccupations. As they sweep by, they can take us into a realm beyond our own.

All the same, we often invade their lives quite ruthlessly — and eating and breeding are often our purposes too. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner feared the albatross, but other sailors cooked them. Captain Cook’s crew “ate them heartily”, we learn.

Women have used birds to make themselves more desirable. Several million little egrets were killed every year in the 1890s to provide them with plumes for their hats. A curious pointed feather taken from woodcocks’ wings was employed to paint gold stripes on Rolls-Royces.

In recent years, we have invaded birds’ lives in a more benign way. We have started to protect their interests. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds now not only has a million members, but also runs a big business to make money for birds. Unfortunately one of its products named after birds was unreflectingly labelled “Marsh Tit Hand and Body Lotion”.

The name of Richard Mabey rightly appears as co-author of Birds Brittanica because he began the work as a sequel to his similar Flora Britannica. However, he fell ill, and Mark Cocker took over. As with the earlier book, many of the stories come from people who wrote in in response to an appeal. The book is arranged under bird species, in the standard order that reflects the bird family tree and is found in bird guides. Cocker not only tells the tales very well, but as an experienced birder always nails them down to the reality of the birds’ lives.

One modern relationship with birds that does not appear much in Birds Britannica is that of the “twitcher”. In America (and increasingly over here) these bird chasers are called “listers”, and Dan Koeppel’s book is the story of his father’s attempt to become a Big Lister — one aiming to see 7,000 or 8,000 birds of the 9,600 species in the world.

It is a touching story, with a strong dose of absurdity. After his marriage broke up, Dan’s father’s interest in birds turned into an obsession. He was a doctor, but found a job that gave him plenty of time. Eventually he became one of the Listers who do not even try to identify the birds for themselves, but are just told what they are looking at by international bird guides, and dutifully tick them off. The leader in the game was Phoebe Snetsinger, who set out to see all the world’s birds when she learnt she had cancer, and died on a birding trip in Madagascar at 8,450 species.

Dan as a young man felt really estranged from his father by this obsession of his, but slowly he came to know him again, and finally went with him to Brazil for his 7,000th bird. He came to see that listing was really not about birds at all, but “an attempt to find one’s place in creation . . . to know everything”.

His father, ever obsessive, also tried to read all of the 169 novels that had been on the Booker Prize shortlists. Almost as hard a job, one might think, when one recalls some of them!

BIRDS BRITANNICA
by MARK COCKER and RICHARD MABEY
Chatto & Windus, £35; 518pp

TO SEE EVERY BIRD ON EARTH
by DAN KOEPPEL
Michael Joseph, £14.99; 256pp
0870 1608080 www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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