Ten Birds That Changed the World

Nature writer Moss (The Swan) surveys in this penetrating history “the long and eventful relationship” between humanity and the avian kingdom by examining the behavior, morphology, and cultural significance of 10 birds that have “changed the course of human history”: bald eagles, Darwin’s finches, dodos, emperor penguins, guanay cormorants, pigeons, ravens, snowy egrets, tree sparrows, and wild turkeys. Considering the emperor penguin, he explains the bird’s distinctive breeding habits (males go for four months without food while incubating an egg) and warns that humans’ carbon emissions are melting the penguin’s breeding grounds and threatening their survival. Other entries also strike a cautionary tone, as when Moss underscores the “fragility of global ecosystems” by discussing how the dodo went extinct after humans introduced rats (which ate dodo eggs) to the bird’s previously predator-free home on Mauritius. Elsewhere, he explores how the 19th-century trade in cormorants’ droppings (guano) for use as fertilizer transformed European agriculture, and how Chinese ruler Mao Zedong’s attempts to eradicate tree sparrows, reviled for eating from seed and grain harvests at a time of famine, backfired after locusts flourished in the absence of their natural predator and decimated the country’s rice harvests in 1959. The blend of history and science highlights the deep connections between humans and the natural world, and the cultural insights enlighten (“One of the reasons eagles were originally chosen as symbols of power... was their wild nature and their unwillingness to be subservient to us humans”). This flies high. (Sept.)