Passions for Birds: Science, Sentiment, and Sport

Sean Nixon's book "Passions for Birds" explores the transformation of human passions for wild birds from the early twentieth century through the 1970s, revealing how emotional, subjective, and material attachments to birds were forged through social and cultural change. It demonstrates how new traditions in birdwatching, conservation, field sports, and bird harvesting mobilized similar feelings towards birds, and how birds themselves became burdened with multiple cultural meanings and social anxieties.

Format: Hardback
Publication date: 15 May 2022
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

Wild birds evoke a range of powerful emotions, from sources of joy and pleasure to objects of sport to food to be harvested. Sean Nixon's book, Passions for Birds, explores the transformation of these human passions for wild birds from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Through a rich range of written sources, Nixon reveals how emotional, subjective, and material attachments to wild birds were forged through a period of pronounced social and cultural change. He demonstrates how new traditions in birdwatching, conservation, field sports, and bird harvesting mobilized remarkably similar feelings towards birds, despite their differences.

Striking similarities also emerged in the material forms that each of these practices used to bring birds closer to people, such as hides and traps, nets and ropes, and binoculars. Passions for Birds is a wide-ranging book that sheds new light on the ways in which wild birds helped shape humans throughout the twentieth century, as well as how birds themselves became burdened with multiple cultural meanings and social anxieties over time.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780228010456