Our Wild Things columnist Eric Brown discovers from a new book why ravens can claim to be the most famous birds of all and which national leader ordered mass extermination of tree sparrows.

An all-over inky blackness suggests sinister, furtive and menacing characteristics not to be underestimated.

The raven is a heavyweight among birds, capable of instilling fear and associated through the ages with death.

In fact ravens are treated with suspicion and dread wherever they occur because of their place in legend and folklore.

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The fearsome-looking largest member of the crow family, bigger even than a buzzard, just oozes attitude with its shaggy throat feathers, enormous bill, wedge-shaped tail and defiant guttural call of kraak.

It may be the most famous bird of all. Ravens appeared in the Holy Bible, Shakespeare, an Edgar Alan Poe poem, Lewis Carroll's Alice adventures, novels by Charles Dickens(who kept a pair of ravens in an aviary) and JK Rowling's Harry Potter stories while being immortalised in place names such as Ravenglass and Ravenscraig. Several Disney films featured ravens including Snow White. Ravens also appeared in every episode of Game of Thrones. A capacity for clearing up battlefield corpses make ravens an essential extra to such blood-curdling productions. Apparently they also gathered at gallows for the same reason.

Noah supposedly released a raven from the ark while a tiny silver figurine dating from approximately AD 900 is believed to show the Norse god Odin flanked by his two ravens Huginn and Muninn. The birds probably changed the world by acting as navigators for invading Vikings who released the birds from their boats to locate land.

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The chapter on ravens is among the best in Ten Birds That Changed the World by Stephen Moss who squeezes their colourful history into 36 entertaining pages. Moss relates good news for ravens. Once driven towards extinction in Britain through hunting by fearful humans they are now increasing in numbers. They may even be seen very occasionally in Bexley and other London boroughs.

Not such good news for tree sparrows in China though. Moss devotes another chapter to the widespread slaughter of these small birds there after ruler Mao Zedong declared tree sparrows a crop-eating pest and ordered his subjects to eliminate them. This decision backfired disastrously.

Other chapters in an unputdownable book feature eagles, pigeons, egrets and finches.