I have just finished reading a fascinating book titled Bird Sense: What It’s Like To Be A Bird.

The book is written by a professor of animal behaviour and explains why birds do what they do and how they see, hear and feel.

Birds can see a whole range of colours that are invisible to us, hear sounds way beyond our hearing, have a sense of smell that allows some birds to follow a trail of plankton across the ocean by the odour alone and have fantastic in-born navigational skills. For example, a nightingale can navigate from the middle of the Sahara Desert to a wood in England, remembered from previous stays. Apparently, birds use the earth’s magnetic field for such navigation.

One story in the book, an example of a bird’s emotions, tells how a Brent goose stood for an entire week beside the corpse of its dead mate, presumably grieving. Would a human being stand beside the body of a dead husband/wife for a week?

This book is full of such wondrous examples and I realise that before reading this book I knew virtually nothing about birds. After reading it, I am left with a sense of wonder and awe at the powers of these creatures, powers that we humans do not possess.

I have no wish to enter the never-ending Maltese bird-shooting debate – to each his own – but I really would recommend that all men in the world who shoot birds read this book, before they blast the next of these wonderful feathered, flying creatures out of the sky.