Book Review Editor: Mark first talked to SOG about the book reviewed below in November 2008. It was a mammoth task and not surprisingly has taken some time to arrive. But was it worth the wait? Here’s what David Tomlinson has to say:
David Tomlinson Birds & People, by Mark Cocker with photographs by David Tipling (Jonathan Cape, £40) While Derek Moore’s book, which I reviewed in the last issue is an easy read, I doubt if anyone will ever consume Mark Cocker’s Birds & People from cover to cover. It’s a hefty tome, tipping the scales at over 3kg, or about as much as an adult Gannet, and contains 400,000 words. It’s a handsome production, stoutly bound and with an eye-catching cover of mounted Mongolian hunters with their Golden Eagles. It’s a timeless shot except for the Ray-Bans that one of them is wearing. - a weighty tome Though the title is a politically correct Birds & People, it might equally well have been called Birds & Man, for it is chiefly about man’s (rather than woman’s) relationship with birds. It’s men, not women, who were responsible for exterminating the Passenger Pigeon and the Dodo, who ambush the migrants as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean, or who dress up in the feathers of birds of paradise in New Guinea. We are reminded that twitchers are predominately male in a picture of “a heaving melee of birders who made pilgrimage to Cley to see a Whitecrowned Sparrow in 2008”. Just two rather embarrassed-looking women can be spotted. Birds & People contains personal anecdotes and stories from more than 650 individuals in 81 different countries. Many of these make compelling reading. I was fascinated, for example, with the account of the Yawar Festival in Peru, when a live Andean Condor is tethered to the back
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off a bull. The locals then fight the bull, ull, before the Condor is eventually released. “Before I went to Cotabambas I was sure that, as a conservationist, I would hate being there and hate the people doing this, yet it was not like that” we read. “It is, however, one of the weirdest spectacles I have ever witnessed… I suspect that the villagers are some of the best allies for saving this magnificent bird.”
Yawar festival
