Like many of our amphibian friends, birds have been around since dinosaur times, and denuded of their feathers, would not look out of place sharing a prehistoric savanna with Tyrannosaurus Rex. But unlike the terrible lizards of yore, birds have survived and adapted over time, congenially sharing the earth with homo sapiens, and even playing a role—not a trivial one, and almost wholly benign—in the human imagination. Birds have never been domesticated, of course, but in art, literature, music, mythology, religion, cinema, sport—and on and on—they are part of the human landscape.

Bridget Stutchbury is a biologist who has written, in Silence of the Songbirds, about the existential threats to birds’ existence. This new volume is not so much a warning as an explanation: The “private lives” of birds—sex, domesticity, masculine and feminine traits, habits of survival—are here examined in entertaining detail, but shown to be the product of a long process of evolution in an ever-evolving world.