Mark Cocker on the winged rat or symbol of peace, the pigeon

Mark Cocker is one of Britain’s foremost writers on nature and contributes regularly to The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, as well as BBC Radio. His is the author of several books including the universally acclaimed Birds Britannica (with Richard Mabey) and Crow Country nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008. He has travelled the world in search of wildlife and won a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship to study the cultural importance of birds in West Africa. He leads the ground-breaking study in natural history and cultural anthropology, the Birds and People project. This is a ten-year long collaboration to survey and document worldwide, the significance of birds