In this respect, bird people are no different from other enthusiasts. Our public lives intersect with an intensely private world, one lit by small moments of intense emotion and delight. For ‘twitchers’, the extreme-sport enthusiasts of the birding world, these experiences may satisfy a competitive urge. For others they may be about a sort of completism, a need to identify a particular species, or perhaps the thrill of learning the possibilities of a new place (or ‘patch’), or rediscovering one already believed known. For others, they may be about quiet moments of almost religious transcendence. Yet for all bird people, these experiences are given shape both by the creatures that inspire them, and by the essentially unpredictable nature of the process, a process which lends itself to both frustration and what Mynott describes as ‘the unrepeatable instant’, those joyous moments in which the elements align, and the world reveals itself in unexpected ways.

While it may simply be that I am, if not a birder, someone who has been deeply fascinated by birds for many years, it is difficult to escape the feeling that as an object of fascination, birds are, in some important sense, different from French clocks or football or beer coasters. Birds occupy a special place in the human imagination, serving as objects of religious veneration, symbols of freedom, power or purity, or simply, in our essentially secular age, objects of wonder. Their habits and migrations help order our world, the first swallows predicting the coming of Northern summer, the departure of waterfowl its passing. As millennia of poetry and art remind us, birds are things of beauty in themselves, not just physically, but by virtue of their capacity for that most extraordinary and liberating symbol of freedom, flight.

Birdscapes: Birds in our imagination and experience is an attempt not only to explore these expressions of the place of birds in the human imagination, but to ask questions about the nature of the fascination itself. What is it about birds that attracts us? What do we see when we look at birds? What do we mean when we say a bird is beautiful? How does what we know about them, in particular scientifically, affect what we see? What sense can we make of the classificatory aspects of our fascination? Is the desire to see new birds just about the birds themselves, or does it have a more base and acquisitive motive? Are birds part of landscapes? Does their presence help us define our relationship to those landscapes? And what is it we hear when we listen to birdsong?

Mynott is refreshingly undoctrinaire here. While he is overly modest in claiming that Birdscapes offers ‘more ruminations than answers’, part of its considerable charm is that it is as much interested in clarifying questions and suggesting lines of enquiry as it is about prosecuting a particular thesis. Neither cultural history nor practical guide, nor even conventional nature writing, the book draws on an extraordinary range of sources, moving fluidly from John Clare and Keats to Sumerian texts and Sufi poets, to wartime censorship of nude revues, Baudrillard, Bede and Yogi Berra (‘You can observe a lot by just looking’).

For all its digressive pleasures, Birdscapes poses deep and often fertile questions. Whether writing about aesthetics or conservation, Mynott constantly offers fresh perspectives, deconstructing our assumptions about the way we understand and experience the world around us with an ease that belies the sophistication of his thinking. What are we seeking to preserve when we attempt to conserve particular species – an ecosystem or a cultural idea about a particular landscape? What do we lose (and more interestingly, gain) when we anthropomorphise birds? To what extent are our ideas about birds and the natural world shaped, indeed constrained, by cultural and linguistic assumptions? (This is not, it must be said, a trivial question, as demonstrated by the existence of Papuan tribes whose taxonomies group the many species of flying birds into one category, and the huge, almost wingless and ground-dwelling cassowary into another.)

Most contemporary nature writing assumes the tone of hushed reverence exemplified by Barry Lopez and Peter Matthiessen (and in an Australian context, Mark Tredinnick). This mode sometimes degenerates into mere gesture, yet it nonetheless embodies the observational impulse that drives such writing, encouraging us to attend to the moment described and see it anew. Set against such antecedents, Mynott’s chatty volubility is all the more striking, contributing more than a little to Birdscapes’ freshness and originality. If nothing else, it gives Mynott room to be funny, not something one would expect of the magisterial Lopez. By contrast the the Australian writer Sean Dooley, whose book, The Big Twitch (2005), Mynott quotes and clearly admires, employs a similarly self-deprecating manner, as does the hilarious naturalist Robert Sapolsky, whose account of two decades working with baboons in Africa, A Primate’s Memoir (2001), stands with Gerald Durrell’s memoirs and Desmond Morris’s Animal Days (1979) as an exemplar of a quite different tradition of writing about animals and the natural world.

At one level, Mynott does something slightly different from Lopez et al. If their work embodies a desire to make manifest the act of observation, Mynott is as concerned with observing that act of observation as he is with actually observing. But, simultaneously, his reflections are grounded in an appreciation of the primacy of experience, an appreciation given shape by close-grained experience of observing birds himself. In many ways, this lies at the heart of his fascinating and improbable book: the simple understanding that learning to see the world around us requires us to accept that world for what it is, and to recognise the limitations of our own way of existing.