All About Birds: A Short Illustrated History of Ornithology

All About Birds is a misnomer, as this book deals very little with birds themselves. Rather, its purpose is to introduce those who have made a significant contribution to the study of birds (I suppose All About Ornithologists wouldn’t have been as attractive of a title!).

Starting with Aristotle and continuing through the mid-20th Century, Chansigaud highlights the individuals, groups, and institutions that have made an indelible impact on our understanding of avian life. Encyclopedic in breadth, it covers both the prominent and obscure. A little background on the person is usually given, but most of each account is devoted to their major contributions.

The individuals included are almost exclusively European or American, with perhaps a slight bias toward the former. The bias didn’t bother me, as I was more familiar with American ornithological history and welcomed the chance to learn more about the European side. However, the lack of non-European and non-American contributors was curious. I suppose that there weren’t many to choose from during the period covered in this book.

The accounts, though fairly wide-ranging, are very brief. Alexander Wilson, the “Father of American Ornithology”, is covered in just half a page, which is about average. As you can imagine, that is barely enough space to cover the major points. Even though it is not nearly exhaustive, All About Birds does contain some fascinating nuggets of information. For example:

• Johann Ferdinand Adam von Pernau, in the early 1700’s, penned the first known written statement showing contempt for the killing of birds: “It is not my intention to describe how to capture birds…but to describe the pleasure of observing these beautiful creatures of God without killing them.”
• Most birds of prey were excluded from the first bird protection laws, and their wanton destruction continued until the mid-20th Century. However, well before Rosalie Edge protected Hawk Mountain, Karl Theodor Liebe “suggested that protection should extend to birds of prey in recognition of the role they played in the balance of nature”. I found that to be a remarkably prescient notion in the late 1800’s.

The writing is adequate, but not very engaging. With the quick succession of names and facts, everything tends to run together. The other recent histories of ornithology, The Wisdom of Birds (my review) and Of a Feather, are more detailed and much longer, but are actually easier and more pleasurable to read.

Another issue I had was that non-English book titles are not translated. You can probably get the gist of most titles even if you do not read that language, but there were many that I could not decipher.

All About Birds is profusely illustrated with portraits of those mentioned in the text, bird paintings, and excerpts from publications. Among the latter group are many title pages from books and journals. These are usually not illustrated, many are in a foreign language, and reproduced so small that no one can read the entire page anyway. They just didn’t add any value for me. Fortunately, they are the exception; most of the illustrations work well and, combined with the layout, make this a very attractive book.

The people, publications, and events mentioned in the main text (and others as well) are also presented as a timeline. This format makes it much easier to visualize the sequence of events as well as to put them in context with other things happening at the same time. This is a welcome, and potentially very useful, inclusion.

Recommendation

All About Birds is an attractive and concise overview of those who have shaped our knowledge of birds. As such, it is a good introduction and reference to those figures. However, I did not feel that I had learned as much about the history of ornithology as I did by reading more narrative-based works, such as the aforementioned The Wisdom of Birds and Of a Feather.