A Bird in the Bush: a social history of birdwatching Stephen Moss Aurum Press, 375pp, £16.99 ISBN 1854109936

Tell people you're a birdwatcher, and you can expect to raise either groans or titters. The activity has come to be identified with the crazed antics of its fanatical wing, the "twitchers", who hire boats and planes to rush to remote islands to "tick" whatever forlorn bundle of storm-tossed feathers they urgently require for their "life-list". Stephen Moss, in this fascinating and comprehensive book, duly recounts the feats of those such as Britain's top twitcher, Lee Evans, who claims to have driven 3.8 million miles at speeds of up to 142mph in search of rare specimens, and to have been involved in at least 11 serious car crashes in the process. Evans lost an eye on one of these occasions - but others have made even greater sacrifices.

In India in 1985, one enthusiast detoured from a path to photograph a spotted owlet, and disturbed a tiger. His final frame showed not a fluffy bird of the night but the great cat's face, "eyes blazing and teeth exposed in a snarl". His corpse displayed a single bite to the neck.

Such exploits certainly merit attention, but Moss points out that twitching is just one aspect of a human preoccupation dating back thousands of years. Birdwatching in the broader sense began in the Stone Age, when early human beings depicted feathered creatures on cave walls. In Gargas, in the French Pyrenees, there is a picture of a crane or heron created roughly 18,000 years ago. The best explanation for the frequent references to birds in the Bible may be the Holy Land's position on a major migration route between Africa and northern Europe.

However, the architect of birdwatching as we know it today was an 18th-century cleric called Gilbert White, whose The Natural History of Selborne, a collection of his meticulously observed letters, is the most widely read nature book ever. White was the first to see the study of birds as something enjoyable, capable of providing "recreation and renewal". Without binoculars or telescope, he managed to distinguish apparently identical species. Unfortunately, his immediate successors were less content to rely on their unaided senses. In the 19th century, a passionate interest in birds developed, but this was also the era of "what's hit is history; what's missed is mystery".

Collecting both birds and their eggs became a popular hobby among the newly leisured Victorian middle class. A plethora of taxidermists sprang up to provide permanent physical mementos of the nation's rural heritage. In 1848, a collector called Charles St John noted, after shooting ospreys at three nests in Sutherland: "There are but very few in Britain at any time . . . As they in no way interfere with the sportsman or others, it is a great pity that they should ever be destroyed."

The logic of such sentiments was al-ready beginning to turn those attracted to birdlife away from the desire to des-troy it. Legislation protecting seabirds was enacted in 1869, after the Manchester Guardian reported that around Flamborough Head, 107,250 seabirds had been destroyed by "pleasure parties" in four months. Revulsion against collecting was accompanied by a backlash against the even more damaging pursuit of bird skins and feathers for the millinery trade. Between 1870 and 1920, 20,000 tonnes of ornamental plumage were imported into Britain. The historian E S Turner has noted that "the dealers of London and Paris nearly suffocated under their wares". In 1889, a group of middle-class women gathered in Manchester to try to put a stop to the use of birds in millinery. Within ten years, their organisation had over 150 branches and more than 20,000 members.

By 1899, when the North American magazine Bird-Lore was able to adopt as its motto the proverb "A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand", birdwatching had become an essentially benevolent activity. In the 20th century it was transformed into a mass leisure pursuit, and today it is a global phenomenon, supported by an industry spanning magazines, books and travel companies. It even has its very own Glastonbury, the British Birdwatching Fair, few of whose 15,000 visitors each year are twitchers. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has more than a million members.

Yet why should it be birds that have captured humanity's imagination, rather than, say, insects, which are more varied, or mammals, our nearest living relatives? Moss quotes the American writer Donald Culross Peattie: "Birds . . . seem to us like emissaries of another world which exists about us and above us, but into which, earthbound, we cannot penetrate."

Maybe, maybe not. Either way, Moss's enthralling book provides plentiful raw material for the contemplation of this and many other interesting questions concerning our own, sadly flightless, kind.

Jill Chisholm is an assistant editor of the NS

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