Here are three very different books about birds by some of our finest writers on nature and science. Matt Ridley’s Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extra­ordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea (4th Estate 352pp £25) is the most ambitious and wide-ranging, exploring the implications of ‘Charles Darwin’s strangest idea’ – that evolution is driven not only by natural selection but also by sexual selection. It’s an idea that has faced opposition since Darwin’s own time, perhaps because it involves female choice, perhaps because it seems to dilute the purity of the all-embracing theory of natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace dismissed it entirely and it was attacked by successive generations of naturalists. But after he had finished On the Origin of Species, Darwin himself showed much more interest in sexual selection than natural selection, which, as Ridley points out, takes a back seat in The Descent of Man. 

Birds, Sex and Beauty opens with the author somewhere on the Pennines before dawn, watching the extraordinary spectacle of a black grouse lek, a loud and lively congregation of male birds. For eight months of the year, black grouse gather daily to strut their stuff, display their spectacular black, white and red plumage and scrap with each other. The fights, however, are not serious and the winners gain no status: a black grouse lek is not an Arthurian tournament where the victor wins the favour of the fair damsel, though that idea dies hard (Ridley calls out David Attenborough for promulgating it). Most of the time, all this goes on in the absence of females, but when the hens do arrive, one cock will get nearly all the sex, enjoying his two seconds of ecstasy with a succession of them. 

Why, asks Ridley, do the male birds go to such bizarre, exhausting lengths? And why do they, like many other birds (notably peacocks and birds of paradise), have such elaborate and beautiful-looking plumage? The answer is that female mating preferences have triggered ‘runaway’ effects in male display. ‘Taste for