'Birds and Us wings its way through 12,000 years of our species' engagement with the avian world. Birkhead tells it all with delightful gusto, plaiting personal encounters with challenging historical research and bewitching scientific rigor' - Tim Dee

'Thought-provoking at every turn, this inspiring, shocking, wonder-filled exploration of our relationship with birds from earliest times delivers a sobering challenge to us living with birds today' - Isabella Tree, author of Wilding

'A fascinating book about the close and often surprising relationship between birds and people, written by one of our leading ornithologists' - Stephen Moss

A richly woven exploration of the deep, evolving relationship between humans and birds

In Birds and Us, award-winning writer and renowned ornithologist Tim Birkhead traces the remarkable, centuries-long history of how people and birds have shaped one another. This captivating narrative spans everything from the sacred ibises mummified by the Ancient Egyptians to the Renaissance scientists fascinated by woodpecker anatomy, from the Victorian craze for egg collecting to today’s urgent efforts to protect endangered species and restore threatened habitats.

Drawing on a lifetime of research and fieldwork, Birkhead threads in compelling stories from his own career in ornithology, including expeditions to extraordinary Neolithic caves in Spain and the vibrant guillemot colonies of the Faroe Islands.

Both a sweeping cultural history and a deeply personal natural-history journey, Birds and Us reveals how our connection with birds has shaped human curiosity, science, art, and conservation, and how, in turn, our changing world continues to shape the lives of the birds we revere.