The Beauty of Birds: From "Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience"

Spring returns and with it the birds. But it also brings throngs of birders who emerge, binoculars in hand, to catch a glimpse of a rare or previously unseen species or to simply lay eyes on a particularly fine specimen of a familiar type. In a delightful meditation that unexpectedly ranges from the Volga Delta to Central Park and from Charles Dickens's Hard Times to a 1940s London burlesque show, Jeremy Mynott ponders what makes birds so beautiful and alluring to so many people. Princeton Shorts are brief selections taken from influential Princeton University Press books and produced exclusively in ebook format. Providing unmatched insight into important contemporary issues or timeless passages from classic works of the past, Princeton Shorts enable you to be an instant expert in a world where information is everywhere but quality is at a premium. What draws us to the beauty of a peacock, the flight of an eagle, or the song of a nightingale? Why are birds so significant in our lives and our sense of the world? And what do our ways of thinking about and experiencing birds tell us about ourselves? Birdscapes is a unique meditation on the variety of human responses to birds, from antiquity to today, and from casual observers to the globe-trotting "twitchers" who sometimes risk life, limb, and marriages simply to add new species to their "life lists." Beauty and the Beholder Acknowledgements and Permissions About the Author Related Titles