7.30 pm Friday July 4th 2025

Tim is one of the world's leading ornithologists, an emeritus professor at Sheffield University and a member of the Royal Society - and makes a much-anticipated return to Wootton.

Tim is committed to the public understanding of science and has written several best-seller books, including The Wisdom of Birds, Bird Sense, The Most Perfect Thing: the Inside (and Outside) of a Bird's Egg, What it’s Like to be a Bird and Birds and Us.

For his appearance in Wootton, Tim will be talking about his latest book on the demise of the great auk - which remains a symbol of human folly and the necessity of conservation

The great auk was a flightless, goose-sized bird superbly adapted for life at sea. Fat, flush with feathers and easy to capture, the birds were in trouble whenever sailors visited their once-remote breeding colonies. Places like Funk Island, off north-east Newfoundland, became scenes of unimaginable slaughter, with birds killed in their millions and, by 1800, the auks of Funk Island were gone Extinct since 1844, Tim says the great auk’s afterlife has been extraordinary and continues to be extraordinary. With so much written about this iconic bird, it is hard to imagine that anything new could be discovered about its life - but that is exactly what has happened. Great auk relics - 75 eggs, 78 stuffed birds and several skeletons - continue to yield new wonders about a bird that was never seen alive by any ornithologist.

Tim's book, The Great Auk, provides an outline of the bird's life, and how it became extinct. Its afterlife focuses on the way its relics have been used to fill in some of the many gaps in our knowledge of how this remarkable bird lived. But those relics are tainted with pathological obsession, money and skulduggery.Thirteen great auk eggs — each worth £100,000 — disappeared in the 1960s, and which, after thirty years of investigation, Tim finally found. This investigation is the book's story

One reviewer of The Great Auk said: "Tim Birkhead is a scientist by training, but he approaches his subject as if he were an investigative reporter and writes as if he were Agatha Christie"

For over 50 years, Tim has been monitoring the thousands of guillemots on the island of Skomer, off the Welsh coast and his life’s work offers an unrivalled insight into seabirds in an era of climate breakdown and also reveals the unexpectedly colourful lifestyles of these gregarious birds.

Here's a link to a film about his work on Skomer The Birdman Of Skomer

If you are interested in attending this talk or would like to reserve a ticket please Contact us

(Children over 16 welcome) Entry is £10 in cash and includes free food, featuring delicious sandwiches and sumptuous rocky-roads., with wine and soft drinks available for a modest donation