Wings of desire: why birds captivate us

Our affections for wild animals are distributed very unevenly. Take insects. Some 750,000 species have already been documented worldwide and the great American naturalist EO Wilson called them "the little things that run the world". Through their recycling of nutrients and the supply of base-level protein to a vast array of higher life forms, insects underpin the existence of life on this planet. Yet when it comes to human concern for creepy-crawlies, forget it.

BugLife is Britain's most important invertebrate conservation organisation. Yet Matt Shardlow, its director, recently lamented: "We have a membership of about 1,000, and we are responsible for 40,000 species." Compare those figures with the statistics for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which today claims 1.3 million members, substantially more than the members of all the UK political parties combined. It tends to the welfare of 250 bird species.

What is it about creatures with feathers that so captivates us? It's certainly not just a modern love affair: Aldous Huxley once claimed that if you took the avifauna out of English verse you would have to dispose of half the poetic canon. It is also wrong to think of it as a purely British phenomenon, although we do seem to be among the more bird-obsessed nations.

There are apparently more than 50 million proper birdwatchers in the US, with three times as many people feeding the feathered visitors to their gardens, creating a national bird-food industry worth $1bn. Through these backyard encounters, birds often function as the central ambassadors in the relationship between people and nature.

In 2005, having finished my book Birds Britannica, which examines Britain's relationship with its island avifauna, I conceived the idea of exploring how and where such ornitho-passions are replicated worldwide. There are roughly 10,500 bird species on Earth, giving rise to a tangle of connections between humans and birds that is rainforest-like in its size and complexity. These range from the chillingly clinical processes of the industrialised chicken unit, to the song and dance ceremonies of the Papuan highlands, with their bird-of-paradise feather displays. The aim of my project was to document as many of these connections as possible. After seven years, Birds and People has now been published.

I wonder at times whether our preoccupation with birds stems from the sheer variety of functional applications into which we have pressed their various body parts. Almost everything that the creatures could yield, from the breast down of sea duck (eider down), and the saliva-composed nests of swiftlets (bird's-nest soup) to the webbed feet of the albatross (tobacco pouches) or the thick fibrous skins of penguins (golf gloves) has been exploited at one time or another.

The chicken is undoubtedly now the most economically important species, supplying us with more protein than cattle, pigs, sheep or goats. In the last decade our annual global consumption was 90m tonnes of meat and 57m tonnes of eggs. The British alone eat 26m eggs a day.

To this we can add an array of more exotic purposes. The Inuit still make rattles from puffin beaks. In the Santa Cruz islands near Samoa they use the scarlet plumes from a gorgeous little scrap called the cardinal myzomela to make carpet-like scrolls of red cloth that once functioned as money. Ortolans are much loved by the French after the buntings have been fattened on oatmeal and drowned in armagnac (the tiny lungs then supply a "liqueur-scented flower of taste" for the epicure diner). The number of ortolans has now declined dramatically but they are still served illegally in certain swanky French restaurants at around €2,000 a kilo.

But I'm not interested merely in birds' utility, both contemporary and historical. As well as scouring the library stacks, I wanted to ask people why birds matter to them. In the end I managed to incorporate the anecdotes and experiences of 650 people from 81 countries.

For the sheer immodesty of the ambition I put some blame on the physical location at which I conceived the book. Somehow the blue skies that dome over Haddiscoe Island near my home in east Norfolk lend themselves to imaginings on a grand scale. For the rest I blame an old friend, John Fanshawe, for pushing me on. A veteran conservationist with BirdLife International, he placed at my disposal his 30 years of quiet diplomacy across the vast BirdLife family. And whenever or wherever the book's photographer David Tipling and I travelled – he alone visited 39 countries – we chivvied folk for their stories about birds.

In Papua New Guinea I talked to trappers about how to snare a cassowary, the ostrich-sized beast with cobalt-blue facial skin and a reputation as the world's most dangerous bird. Armed with bottles of Russian vodka, Tipling schmoozed Mongolian nomads to draw out how they hunt for foxes using trained golden eagles. I managed to elicit contributions from acclaimed novelists on the ethics of shooting grouse in the Canadian backwoods (Margaret Atwood), or on their attachments to swifts and the use of dove symbolism in their writings (Jim Crace – see extracts below).

I quizzed celebrated Balkan authors on whether Serbians eat turkey at Christmas. They don't: traditionally it is carp on Christmas Eve and roast suckling pig the following day, with "crackling as thin as paper" (Vesna Goldsworthy). I checked with Northumberland poets about the love affair between north-east miners and their racing birds: "Say what tha likes aboot me or ma lass, but dinna say owt aboot me pigeons" (Katrina Porteous).

What was striking, and moving, was the similarity of the responses – to such an extent that our reactions to specific birds start to look hard-wired into the human system. One example is the affecting power of swallows.

Time after time, country after country, people spoke of their love for swallows. Hardened Argentinian workmen would not finish the wiring of a porch until the martins had fledged their brood. One British family thinks of the first swallow of the year at their farm as their returning granny (it was her favourite bird). The lucky member of the clan who spots the early arrival sends a text to all the relatives. It says simply: "Granny's Back."

The most extraordinary expression of this affair between humankind and hirundines comes from the US. The purple martin is a large, broad-winged swallow of sumptuous royal blue with a gurgling liquid song. In pre-colonial times Native Americans of the south-eastern states would hang empty gourds on poles to attract the birds to breed in the vicinity of their settlements. Black slave communities began to follow suit, and eventually the practice of erecting martin houses was adopted nationwide. Today virtually the entire species – an estimated 6 million birds in a million colonies – has become a rent-free tenant of the American people. Note that this is distinct from the adventitious breeding of swallows on British outbuildings or barns. Purple martin boxes serve no human purpose other than to accommodate – and to guarantee the company of – another wild species.

The owl family generated a similar universal response. In recent decades, however, our attitudes to the bird have been transformed. The natural sciences have now shed light on the mysterious nocturnal ways of owls. In the west they have gone from the dread birds of night, associated with death and misfortune, to cute familiars whose images are the endless stuff of Disney or household knicknackery. Today in Britain one is just as likely to find a white owl on a Christmas card as the white dove of peace.

Yet there are many African communities who still fear the creatures as omens of disaster. In parts of west Africa the standard pidgin English for the beast is "witch bird". From Togo to Nigeria a section of street markets is devoted to fetish practices known as jou-jou or gris-gris. Owl skins are the most frequent items on sale and are used in occult formulae by magico-medicinal practitioners.

One contributor told of the caged owls in Khartoum Zoo that are routinely spat on and cursed as agents of evil. In 1997 an owl flew into a Malawian hospital. Many patients fled the wards but several brave individuals captured the befuddled animal after stoning it to the ground, then doused it in paraffin and set it alight.

Before we succumb to moral outrage we should recall how a "howlet's wing" is added to the witches' broth in act four of Macbeth. In Switzerland and France until the 1960s owls were routinely nailed to the barn door to ward off lightning or the evil eye. Another story we received was from an ornithologist searching for an extremely rare owl in Nigeria. He chanced on a young boy, showed him a picture of the species and asked if he had ever seen one. Yes, of course, said the child. He took the scientists to the kitchen and there in the cooking pot were the telltale head and feet of Scotopelia bouvieri, the little-known vermiculated fishing owl.

A recurrent though explicable phenomenon in Birds and People is the way in which practising ornithologists and environmentalists seem discomfited when speaking of any emotional connection with birds. For the want of a better expression, it was "ordinary" people who said the most extraordinary things.

This, for instance, from a mother who lost her 22-year-old daughter in a car accident. Weeks after the funeral, "something" told her to go to the french windows at the other side of the house and there, sitting on the patio, was a kingfisher that she picked up and stroked before the bird finally flew away. That moment of intimacy with an astonishingly blue bird was, its author confessed, "a mystifying solace to me over the years".

Another contributor, a recently bereaved widow, took to walking by the sea and enjoying the sight of oystercatchers at the tide edge. She describes how "one day as I approached they started to hop away; I'd never seen them hopping before! Well over a hundred oystercatchers hopping towards the sea; it was hilarious." (Oystercatchers stand on one leg and hop to conserve heat energy otherwise lost from the out-stretched limb.) The birds became a source of comfort, and a motif of the reassertion of joy in her life.

With such stories we start to touch on the reasons birds affect us in ways that many other creatures do not. First, birds are in some ways similar to people. They are bright, often beautiful, with plumages not dissimilar to costumes. More than that: the kingfisher held in that outstretched palm stood on two legs. Oystercatchers stalk and trot across the sands just like people playing on the beach. Crabs don't. Dogs don't. In fact no living creatures within our immediate – and diurnal – environment do. Birds also vocalise to one another. Oystercatchers cleep and shout, argue and chivvy one another in an endless round of social interaction. It sounds like – in some way it surely is – a kind of language.

Then birds do something people never have and never shall. They fly off. In that moment they are transformed from something resembling ourselves to a life utterly beyond our reach. A swift – the bird that nests in holes over our heads in the roof cavity – might not land until it finally breeds at the age of about five. Think of it: flying without pause for years.

The central symbolic value that birds play in language, literature, art, thought and religion is that of transformation from one state to another. The idea is ancient, visceral and undeniable. Mesolithic infants have been found buried with their heads resting on swans' wings. The symbol for the Holy Spirit in the Christian faith is a dove. In south-east Asia cranes carried the souls of the dead to heaven. At weddings throughout the western world people release white doves as a symbol of the couple's love. In Europe white storks bring the spring. Muslims built hospitals to house injured storks and made it an offence to harm them. Traditionally the symbol of homecoming for sailors was the swallow tattooed on their arms.

The examples are innumerable. Central to them all is the idea that birds often express our most cherished ideas and our most exalted values. Look at the spectrum of national flags and other state insignia. Birds, particularly birds of prey, are everywhere – few other creatures feature. It is surely this association with transcendence, or some tiny fragment of it, that is at work in all our encounters with birds. And it is for this reason that they are so crucial to our relationship with all nature.

If I had to pick out a single contribution to Birds and People, it would be the 19 lines by Karen Buchinsky from Massachusetts. She sent us an anecdote – in fact it is a short story to rival Maupassant or Hemingway in its power and brevity of expression. It could be entitled "The drug addict and the hummingbird":

"She'd always been a city girl. She lives downstairs from my friend in the projects. She's pretty sometimes, and sometimes she's on a run. She has a bad drug habit that comes and goes. Although she's an adult, Rosa has never rollerskated or ridden a bike or been camping. Never swum in a lake or in the ocean, only stuck her toes in the pool. Sometimes she has a nice shy smile and hello, and sometimes she's furtive, sly, but at least she'll nod hi to me. One time she saw me filling the hummingbird feeder on the porch, and she got so excited she could hardly speak. 'I saw a … it went like …' and here she held up her hand and it quickly flew sideways, hovered, and flew forward and fluttered, hovering again. 'It was a … it was like…' Her eyes were wide, excited.

I smiled at her. 'You saw a hummingbird!' I said.

She pointed at me. 'Jess! A little bird!' She grinned. 'Hummingbird. It was a hummingbird?'

She was a 42-year-old city girl, and she saw her first hummingbird."

Another of my favourite pieces comes from a Canadian farmer, who describes how moved she was to see the chickadees surviving in her garden despite the relentless -40C temperatures of the Saskatchewan winter. She ends her account with the words: "In them is found no wrong." No professional ornithologist or ecologist would ever dream of saying such a thing.

It is not just that we see birds as little versions of ourselves. It is also that, at the same time, they stand outside any moral process. They are utterly indifferent. This absolute oblivion on their part, this lack of sharing, is powerful. The chickadees – busy out there, beyond the window, in the Arctic cold – belittle our achievements. They emphasise how species-specific are our concerns.

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his book Totemism pointed out that for tribal peoples in the South American rainforest birds were more than just good to eat. They were also important to think with and to think about. In a sense Birds and People is a worldwide quest for the ways in which birds have allowed us to think.

Many species are facing extinction. Biological loss carries with it a cultural shrinkage that we shouldn't overlook. When birds are gone we lose all that they mean and all that they allow us to express. Species extinction, the silent crisis so dwarfed by our concern for carbon and climate change, is not just a process that affects other creatures in their environments. Species loss is our loss. It strips away what makes us human.

Margaret Atwood on grouse shooting

I lived in woods as a child. My dad – a crack woodsman and subsistence expert – hunted grouse. So did my brother, with a bow, before he was of firearm age. The grouse were somewhat easy to track because of the drumming they do – usually on hollow logs, using the log as an amplifier and beating with their wings. We didn't have any dogs. We only ever hunted grouse in order to eat them. (They are delicious but we had to watch for pellets.) It was the war. It was the woods – there were no grocery stores. The alternate animal proteins were Spam and Klick and smoked bacon. We fished for the same reason – to eat. The idea of killing any animal or fish for sport and then throwing it away is repugnant to me.

Graeme Gibson on his pet parrot Harold Wilson

Early in the autumn of 1964 I bought a parrot in Oaxaca, Mexico. He was a handsome creature, very healthy and full of life. I named him Harold Wilson. He scarcely said anything at all, but he barked like two dogs at once, made roaring noises like a vacuum cleaner, and spoke my sons' names. He was bright and affectionate, and soon became an amusing and responsive member of the family.

However, back in Toronto a year later I became uneasy about Harold's situation. As winter cold and darkness set in I saw that the bird was miserable: diminishing daylight must have been bad enough, but I also sensed that he was lonely. By spring I'd arranged to give him to the Toronto Zoo, a modest operation back then. The director led us to the aviary, where a congenial cage had been prepared. Waiting inside was a female parrot named Olive. Watched by my sons and a gathering crowd, I entered the cage, with Harold on my wrist. When I placed him on the main perch, Olive shuffled away. I said my goodbyes and turned to leave. Then Harold did something that astonished me. For the very first time, and in exactly the voice my kids might have used, he called out "Daddy!" When I turned to look at him he was leaning towards me expectantly. "Daddy," he repeated.

I don't remember what I said to him. Something about him being happier there, that he'd soon make friends. The kind of things you say to kids when you abandon them at camp. But outside the aviary I could still hear him calling as we walked away. I was shattered: he called me "Daddy" because he'd identified himself with my children, but was using the name for the first time – out of desperation. Both Konrad Lorenz and Bernd Heinrich mention instances of birds calling out the private names of intimates when threatened by serious danger. I am no longer surprised by such information. We think of our captive birds as our pets, but perhaps we are theirs as well.

Jim Crace on swifts

I am most used to the swifts of the English Midlands, no more than a dozen at a time and so distant above our garden in early summer that even binoculars barely diminish their remoteness. But still I crane my neck and track them at every opportunity, hoping I suppose to requite their deep indifference for me with my high regard for them. They are a bird neither friendly nor unfriendly, but unforthcoming certainly and conspicuously uninvolved with the earthbound world below them. Aloof (originally a boating term meaning 'away and to windward') is the exact word for my swifts; it captures perfectly their yachting wings, their epic, weather-driven restlessness, their teasing fickle seasonality. It's hard to not feel wonderstruck by swifts.

So what am I to make of my birds' alpine cousins (alpine swift, Apus melba) Here, this evening, in Grasse in the Alpes Maritimes of southern France, the noise trapped in the dilapidated, medieval, traffic-free alleyways and courtyards is deafening and eerie. At least a thousand screaming swifts have condescended to spend an hour close to me. I could almost catch one with a butterfly net if I stretched high enough and if they weren't such whizz-kids of the wing, celebrating every duck and dive and every taken bug with their falsetto palaver. In the final shadows of the evening, these alpine swifts are closer to my head than either starlings or bats would ever dare to come. They are as close as gnats. I'm standing in the eye of the swarm. But still I cannot claim any intimacy with them. Despite this tumultuous proximity, they are not sharing any of their world with me. There is no interface, no common ground. They're still aloof. My love for them is vain. All they know about is bugs and air, feeding, flying, moving on. They leave me gaping at an empty sky.