Showing results for "Birds" in Europe

Bloomsbury presents The Cuckoo's Lea: The Forgotten History of Birds and Place by Michael J. Warren, read by John Sackville Birds have long inspired our emotional and imaginative connections to physical environments, but where did it all begin? Hidden in the names of English towns and villages...

No other group of animals has had such a complex and lengthy relationship with humankind as birds. They have been kept in cages as pets, taught to speak and displayed as trophies. More practically, they have been used to tell the time, predict the weather, foretell marriages, provide unlikely cures for ailments, convey messages and warn of poisonous gases. When There Were Birds is a social history of Britain that charts the complex connections between people and birds, set against a background of changes in the landscape and evolving tastes, beliefs and behaviours.

Birds in a Cage is the untold story of one of the most bizarre and enriching episodes in the history of British environmentalism. At Warburg, Germany, in 1941, four British PoWs find an unexpected means of escape from the horrors of internment when they form a bird-watching society and embark on an obsessive quest behind barbed wire. Through their shared love of birds, they overcome hunger, hardship, fear and stultifying boredom. Their quest draws in not only their fellow prisoners but also some of the German guards, at great risk to them all....

At one point or another, just about everyone has heard of the dodo bird, which is almost universally described as a cuddly, whimsical creature renowned for its alleged stupidity. This prehistoric avian had been known for hundreds of years, before it was made popular around the world in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.