The early bird catches the worm...

TRY SNEAKING up on a pigeon. It seems to have eyes in the back of its head. In fact, it has a visual range of 340º, leaving little or no blind spot especially when the bird is boppin’ along, head dipping and rising like one of those toy dogs in the back windows of cars.

Meanwhile, the woodcock, a strange looking bird, can literally see what’s going on behind it. In the course of evolution, its eyes have moved to a position high on its head and far to the sides, giving a visual field of 360º. Thus, it can see in all directions at once.

Even with its beak buried up to its nostrils as it probes for food, it can still keep a look-out for predators approaching from behind or, indeed, from any angle. It is no wonder that this miracle of nature looks bizarre; its ears are below the eyes to the front of its skull. This is because there was no other place to put them but as any shooter will tell you, in the deep, dark forests where woodcock roam they serve them well.

Birds have been around a whole lot longer than we have. Fossils of the first creatures with feathers indistinguishable from those of a modern bird were found in slate deposits in Germany and dated at 150 million years old. Bones from herons, vultures and kingfisher were found in London clay laid down 38 to 54 million years old. We are but johnny-come-latelys. When Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, ‘mother of all Mankind’, walked the African plains a mere four million years ago, larks and the like were already climbing the skies and raining down song. Bird song may well have been the genesis of music — not that, one supposes, we ourselves couldn’t sing, raising our voices in joy or sorrow from the earliest stage of our evolution. When did the first thing we were — out of which we would become Homo sapiens — string sounds together in a song?

Lucy and her sisters stood perhaps one metre tall, her brothers as tall as one metre seventy. Speaking personally, in terms of altitude, we haven’t evolved much since. I’m sure they sang as well as we do today.

Our primitive ancestors clearly appreciated beauty. In the caves at Lascaux and Altamira the depictions of animals are breathtaking in their perfection, in the skill and grace with which they portray, most especially, movement. In these cave drawings, the wild bulls are charging, the antelope leaping, the horse galloping: it is extraordinary to think that people whose technology had not developed further than the fire and stone tools sought so uncompromisingly after perfection and had, amongst their small numbers, artists to rival Leonardo. These were not scribbles traced by passing hunters: Lascaux and Altamira were cave temples, on the walls and roofs of which galleries of frescoes were drawn. They were occupied and visited over thousands of years.

The robust, yet sublime, expression of the spirit of the animals — the power of the mammoths, the speed of the horses, the grace of the antelopes — indicates an empathy with the creatures themselves and their species. Did they try to capture this essence, be it courage, speed or grace to make it their own, or were the depictions a prelude to the chase? Were the creatures honoured, then hunted? In the huge frescoes, one can almost hear the hooves thundering and the cries of the stick men giving chase.

Humans were rare at the time. Herds of animals roamed the Cantabrian plains. Humans are depicted as rectangular boxes, with sticks for arms and legs. Stick-men with spears, they stand in groups amongst the far finer animal portraits. There is no human portrait, or none has survived. Why not a face?

Of themselves, they left only palm prints, each one, of course, different from the next in its life lines, contours and proportions which, when first laid down, before fading with the millennia, would have been clearly visible and distinct. In our modern world, with terror and paranoia abroad, we now turn again to identification by hand prints and finger prints, ‘biometrics’ it is called. I doubt these people enshrined the shape of their hands for such reasons, rather to register that they had been here, that they had been. And in the cave paintings, they clearly record not only the spirit of the animals but the quality of their own souls.

To return to the birds, I note that further fantastic features of our feathered friends include the ostrich eye, five times as big as ours. If our eyes were proportionately as big as a starling’s, they would be the size of cricket balls and we would look even stranger than we do.