Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art and philosophy.
Watching birds, as we all do as SBSG members, is just one of the many different ways people interact with birds. Over time we have variously worshipped them as gods, hunted them for food, adorned ourselves with their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight and, more recently, we have recognised the need to protect them.
The talk will comprise a journey through our mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians, to Renaissance research on woodpecker tongues, from obsessive Victorian egg collectors, to the behaviour and ecology of birds, to the present and the increasingly urgent fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats.
In many ways the talk will be the culmination of a lifetime's ornithological research and my deep concerns for the conservation of birds, and — I hope— shows how birds shaped us, and how we have shaped them.
