Ornithology: Humans who birdwatch are addicted to a pursuit regarded as eccentric, arcane or simply trainspottingly dull by almost all other members of our species, with the possible exception of our sorely tried nearest and dearest.
Yet birdwatching can no longer be marginalised as an insignificant movement in social terms, at least in the developed world. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Britain has more than a million members. Commercial activity associated with ornithology has mushroomed into serious business, selling everything from specialist holidays to telescopes, birdfood, cd-roms and wax jackets.
Birders are also a political lobby to be reckoned with, twisting the arms of environmental policymakers in Brussels and Washington. That arm can, of course, be twisted in the other direction, and even broken, as we have seen at home in the shameful spancelling of Dúchas, partly because that fine organisation put the protection of the hen harrier above the perceived interests of the agri-business sector. Feelings run very high on these matters: one of these rare and beautiful (to birdwatchers) birds of prey was shot and dispatched by post to the Kerryman with a threatening letter.
Bird conservation has attracted heated controversy for a long time, as Stephen Moss demonstrates repeatedly in this informative, readable but ultimately disappointing book. And sometimes the hottest rows took place between different factions within the birdwatching movement.
In the 19th century, lack of good optical equipment meant that the only way to identify birds with any accuracy, especially small ones, was to "collect" them. Pioneers of ornithology, like John James Audubon in the US and George Montagu in Britain, were excellent marksmen who killed prodigious numbers of the "feathered tribe" to which they were so devoted. Egg-collecting on a vast scale was also considered essential for the advancement of birdwatching as both hobby and science.
"Birds-nesting" was certainly the first step towards a lifelong passion for innumerable schoolboys. For reasons Moss attempts gallantly but not entirely successfully to explain, female birdwatchers have always been a rare breed .
However, as the quality of binoculars improved dramatically in the first half of the last century, and the rising number of extinctions revealed the negative impact of both shooting and egg-collecting, arguments raged between old-guard birdwatchers who insisted that at least limited shooting was essential to science, and those who advocated new and painstaking techniques of field observation.
Moss makes a convincing case that at least some members of the old guard have had their scientific contributions unfairly diminished because they supported what now clearly appears as the wrong side of this debate.
There was also a battle royal between 20th-century birders and two other social movements. One was fashion, which had long relied on birds to a degree which now seems almost as exotic as, and rather less aesthetically pleasing than, the headgear of the Aztecs. As one ornithological magazine put it: "Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than a young woman sporting an entire herring gull on her head?"
The plumage wars, fore-runners of the fur wars of today, were finally won by the conservationists. So was the war against another social interest group, those who defended indiscriminate shooting, for sport or for the pot. The network of national and international laws which now protects, at least theoretically, most bird species, is a monument to the lobbying of birdwatchers, but they came too late for the great auk and the passenger pigeon, among many others.
The second half of the last century saw a revolution in birdwatching which Moss links to a number of social and scientific factors.
Increased leisure time brought badly needed new blood from the middle and working classes into a field hitherto dominated by the wealthy. The private car first, and then cheap flights, enabled people with modest incomes to visit habitats beyond the imagination of the pre-war generations.
Electronic communications, from pagers to mobile phones to the internet, have created instant communication between birdwatchers. This phenomenon has boosted the "twitching" faction in birding to lunatic proportions, whereby individuals will cross continents to add a brief rare bird sighting to their "tick list", arguably at a cost to their appreciation of the beauty and interest of the birds outside their back doors. It has also, however, boosted the long and vital tradition of collaboration between amateur observers and professional scientists, because migration and breeding statistics can now be collated so much more rapidly and accurately.
In the 1980s, greatly improved portable telescopes brought birds so much closer to observers that key figures like Peter Grant and the Irish bird artist Killian Mullarney called for a "New Approach to Bird Identification". This movement led to new bird books like the superbly illustrated 1999 Collins Bird Guide (inexplicably not mentioned in this book) which have in turn transformed the way many of us see birds.
Moss records all this information faithfully, with copious, perhaps too many, examples. This leads to a book closer to anthology than to analysis, and with a style, lively enough at first, that sometimes slows towards plodding pace. Some of the recent material on British birdwatching has already been covered much more vividly by Mark Cocker in Birders: Tales of a Tribe, a book Moss repeatedly acknowledges. And he never approaches the level of insight, scientific, aesthetic and social, of books like Scott Weidensaul's Living on the Wind, or Leonard Nathan's marvellous little Diary of a Left-Handed Birder.
A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching By Stephen Moss Aurum Press, 375pp. £16.99
Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Yale 2003). He is currently researching a book on habitat restoration