Barnes can also be a bit sloppy with biological details. For example, there is no evidence that the tubes in an albatross beak function like pitot tubes to measure their air speed; rather, these nasal channels are for the outflow from their salt glands and allow them to survive in a high-sodium, oceanic environment. Before one conjecture, Barnes suggests that the reader may “miss this bit if you have taste for scientific rigor.” Although I felt that way at times about the whole book, Barnes provides a companionable view of why we love birds, their lives and futures.

Bernd Brunner’s “Birdmania” is a cultural history of the varieties of human ornithological obsession. Much like Barnes’s book, “Birdmania” is also a series of choppy vignettes organized into topical chapters. However, Brunner focuses more on the mania than the birds.

To Brunner, birdmaniacs are mostly an odd, selfish and even cruel bunch. The English bird illustrator and publisher John Gould is described as an “unscrupulous profiteer.” The travelogues of Hugo Weigold, a pioneer bird bander in the early 20th century, are described as “full of cold-blooded arrogance.” The pioneering American bird-watcher Phoebe Snetsinger, who traveled the world to observe 8,674 bird species before being killed in a traffic accident during a birding trip in Madagascar, is presented as an example of “wealthy people who cut themselves off almost completely from their partners, children and other family obligations …just to add one entry or another to a fervently kept list of bird sightings.”

To make sure his pessimistic message is right up front, a third of Brunner’s 19 chapters focus on famous liars in ornithology. We meet the French ornithologist François Levaillant, who cribbed some illustrations for his “Natural History of the Birds of Africa (1805-08)” from other sources, and incompetently (or deviously?) included numerous species not found on the continent. We are also introduced to the 20th-century aristocratic British ornithologist, spy and sociopath Richard Meinertzhagen, who switched tags among bird specimens to support his hypotheses and who might have shot his first wife to hide the deception before running off with his children’s nanny.

Brunner has a special gripe against the scientific collectors of birds. Yet he never acknowledges, or perhaps comprehends, the vital contributions that museum collections make to our understanding of the biology of birds.

Of course, birdmaniacs are people, too, with human foibles and faults. But Brunner makes little attempt to understand the cultural or intellectual contexts in which these historical birdmaniacs lived and loved birds. Even if some of his harsh judgments are accurate, “Birdmania” does not portray birdmania as very attractive. Perhaps the censorious tone is exaggerated by the translation from the German original, but I was left wondering whether Brunner actually likes birds, bird people, or even people in general.