Ireland's Birds: Myths, Legends and Folklore by Niall Mac Coitir

 genre: nonfiction

I'm a bird lover myself, so when I saw this book in a little shop in Blackrock, County Wicklow, I grabbed it. It's exactly what it it's title says, a book about different birds and how they play into the fabric of Irish stories and folklore.  It's methodical and well organized - sometimes repetitive enough that it felt like it's almost meant to be used more as a reference manual rather than read cover to cover, but it didn't bother me.  Swallows and robins, eagles, plovers and hawks - more than twenty different birds are identified and explored for their cultural significance.

Here is what this book makes me think of: birds were just SUCH a huge part of ancient life.  Birds could tell the future and predict the weather, they were used to cure ills and for the feasting table.  It's astonishing how much there is to know about how birds over the years!  It makes me think about what life was like before "science," before we humans understood how things worked around us - without that knowledge, looking to the natural world for information makes perfect sense!  

It's a bit dry and its definitely a niche topic.  But I'm not sorry I read it because I feel like I gained such an interesting perspective of the lives of the early Irish as well as the early Irish world.