The subtitle of Tim Birkhead's superb book Bird Sense is "What it's like to be a bird". The effect of his admirably brisk but sparklingly lucid pages is to refocus the point of view on to us and force a rethink as to what it's like to be a human sharing the earth with such wonderfully different and yet recognisably similar animals. After such knowledge we might never be quite the same again.
The robin and the blue tit that came to my back-garden bird table as I wrote that sentence are living in a world splashed in ultraviolet colour and with a palpable magnetic field. Having this and much more, the owl's ears and so on, vividly explained is like having the top of your own head lifted off and its contents deliciously stirred: no one after reading this book could think it was possible to know too much, no one could think science removes us from feeling.
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