Wild Air: In Search of Birdsong James Macdonald Lockhart (HarperCollins, £18.99)
The Year of Sitting Dangerously: My Garden Safari Simon Barnes (Simon & Schuster, £16.99)
WE share with the birds 50 genes or more to do with sound-making, which leads to the lovely notion that early hominids perched in trees and sang like the feathered things. Even that most scientific of bods, Charles Darwin, speculated in that our language commenced with singing. The brainbox philosopher