A lovely fresco painted about 3,500 years ago on the island of Santorini, Greece, shows a pair of swallows dancing in the air, their beaks about to touch as they whirl around. It is spring, and the lilies sprouting from the rocks below and beside the birds look as if they wanted to reach toward them, eager for a share in that lightness. Birds can go wherever they want, muses Boria Sax in “Avian Illuminations,” his wide-ranging, wistful history of human connections with the bird world, from the first drawings on cave walls to Rachel Carson’s dire warnings. Some birds may beat their wings, some might just prefer to let...

A lovely fresco painted about 3,500 years ago on the island of Santorini, Greece, shows a pair of swallows dancing in the air, their beaks about to touch as they whirl around. It is spring, and the lilies sprouting from the rocks below and beside the birds look as if they wanted to reach toward them, eager for a share in that lightness. Birds can go wherever they want, muses Boria Sax in “Avian Illuminations,” his wide-ranging, wistful history of human connections with the bird world, from the first drawings on cave walls to Rachel Carson’s dire warnings. Some birds may beat their wings, some might just prefer to let themselves be carried by the wind. It is almost impossible, writes Mr. Sax, “to imagine this sort of freedom.”

But is it? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for one, has little trouble picturing a life in the sky. His spirited “Flights of Fancy,” written for young adults but certain to appeal to a wider audience, reminds us of the hard, adaptive work that went into getting birds to the point where they are now. They weren’t the first creatures to fly—insects ruled the air for 200 million years before the first vertebrates flapped their bony wings—and they are certainly not the only ones. Jana Lenzová’s quirky illustrations, a perfect complement to Mr. Dawkins’s amiable prose, feature wide-eyed flying squirrels, sharp-clawed pterosaurs, levitating astronauts, even aerial plankton. A comical highlight of the book is the correction Ms. Lenzová applies to the wings of the archangel Gabriel in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Annunciation, underscoring Mr. Dawkins’s point that the puny appendages in the original would never have gotten that angel off the ground.

We have come a long way since the flying machines Leonardo dreamed up. Building ever more ingenious devices, humans can now do things the birds can’t, such as floating weightlessly in space. (“Flights of Fancy” is dedicated to Elon Musk, “high-flyer of the imagination.”) But are such non-avian examples, in terms of power, sheer beauty and effectiveness, really a match for the breathtaking view (memorably drawn by Ms. Lenzová) of a sleek peregrine falcon in full descent, wings folded tight against its streamlined body, eyes and mind trained on its target? There is, in Mr. Sax’s caustic assessment, “a lot more to flight than elevation.” The mythical Icarus learned that lesson the hard way, as did, in the early 1500s, his early modern imitator in Scotland, John Damian. When the “Birdman of Stirling Castle,” armed with a pair of poultry wings, hopped off the castle’s tallest tower, he went straight into a dung heap. He was aiming for France.

A wonderfully illustrated volume edited and published by Phaidon Press, “Bird: Exploring the Winged World” puts such aerial escapades in the context of millennia of avian art. Here the frolicking swallows of Santorini appear next to Vincent van Gogh’s brooding sketch of four swifts, the rough lines of the artist’s pen reflecting the speed with which these passed by. “Bird” revels in such inspired pairings, juxtaposing, for example, the famous line-up of Galápagos finches from Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle” with the imprint, in Bavarian limestone, of a dying Archaeopteryx. In a similar vein, Picasso’s drawing of the dove of peace follows Steve McCurry’s photograph of a kneeling woman in a burqa, feeding an army of white doves outside Istanbul’s Blue Mosque. And Rosa Bonheur’s 1870 painting of a wounded golden eagle, cascading down with talons clenched, one futile wing still extended, contrasts with Andy Warhol’s 1983 screen print of a proud bald eagle, its throbbing outline traced in fiery red.

Artists have long known that birds, besides being beautiful, are also extremely vulnerable. Consider Albrecht Dürer’s extraordinary 1512 watercolor of the ripped-off wing of a European roller—a seraph’s pinion awash in green, blue, red and brown, gaudier than anything found in heaven but now dead. During the last 50 years, the number of birds in the United States and Canada alone has fallen by 29% percent, a dismal tally hovering behind Miranda Brandon’s photograph “Impact” (2014), a portrait of a dead warbler slumped against its ghostly mirror image, an avian Narcissus slain, as so many birds are, in a window collision.

If “Bird: Exploring the Winged World” takes us on an unpredictable journey around the world, “Birds,” Tim Flach’s stunning new volume, welcomes us into the British photographer’s studio, where even the oddest exemplars of the winged world look, at first blush, as if we’d met them before. Like 18th-century Dutch burghers stiffening for their portraits, Mr. Flach’s birds, most of them born into captivity and sitting in aviaries constructed for the purpose, freeze into place before his lens. His northern cardinal, fully living up to its name, decked out in dazzling clerical red, directs a frown of disapproval at the viewer, while the king vulture, shifting its multicolored head, gives us the side-eye. And then there’s that Inca tern with its impossibly curved facial feathers, markers of manly vigor: “the Salvador Dalí of the bird world,” in Mr. Flach’s description. Yet the overall effect of Mr. Flach’s gallery isn’t humorous—collectively, his portraits shock us out of any easy sense of familiarity. These birds’ fantastical wattles, crests and casques, their elaborately patterned feathers and creatively shaped beaks, often shown in extreme detail, exceed any accoutrements that could have sprung from a human fashion designer’s mind.

“Birds are a revelation,” exults the ornithologist Richard O. Prum, author of the insightful mini-essays sprinkled throughout “Birds.” The camera would seem most perfectly suited to document the intricacies of their beauty and behavior—a premise thoroughly refuted, however, by the selections in Philip Kennedy’s anthology “The Bird: The Great Age of Avian Illustration.” (Perhaps publishers’ fondness for such general titles—“Bird,” “Birds,” “The Bird”—is an acknowledgment that however many images we may make of individual species, we’ll never fully capture the reality of what it means to be a bird.)

Mr. Kennedy, an active illustrator himself, presents a bevy of unfamiliar 18th and 19th-century artists, such as Elizabeth Albin (1708-1741), likely the first woman to have illustrated a bird book. Collaborating with her father, Albin created richly colored, dreamy images, such as the one chosen here of a greater painted-snipe looking regal as it parades along the shore, its rich, chestnut-brown neck offset by the bronze-green wings. Charles Reuben Ryley’s king penguin from the 1790s—the members of its colony sketched lightly into the landscape behind him—rules kingly over its treeless (and still humanless) home in the Falklands. And Elizabeth Gwillim’s little cinnamon bittern from 1801 needs no background to be gorgeous. In such unfamiliar company, enriched by multiple Japanese woodblock prints, the works by the more canonical painters shine again—witness the penetrating eyes, glistening with hostility, of Edward Lear’s Dalmatian pelicans, drawn for John Gould’s “The Birds of Europe” (1832-37). A poignant father-son portrait set on a remote rocky shore, Lear’s composition both encourages and laments the viewer’s intrusion into his birds’ private lives.

Many of these artists had never seen their subjects alive, let alone visited their habitats. But as the poet Emily Dickinson pointed out, with aching disappointment, even the birds we do observe tend to hurry out of our consciousness before we have fully grasped them, gliding through the air in a way that is, in Dickinson’s phrase, “too silver for a seam.”

In the 1880s, the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) became determined to lay bare those seams. He created a new apparatus with a rotating shutter, the “chronophotographic gun,” allowing him to take 12 consecutive shots per second of a flying duck, gull, or pelican, which would then appear in the same photographic plate. Voilà—as exact a record of the motions of a bird in full flight as anyone had ever attempted. Today, more than a century later, the Spanish photographer Xavi Bou (who, like Marey, is included in “Bird: Exploring the Winged World”), is repeating these experiments, but with a difference.

Using a video camera, Mr. Bou takes dozens of frames per second of airborne gulls, swifts, starlings or flamingos and then stitches thousands of these shots together into one composite picture. Condensing evanescent flight paths into hauntingly beautiful objects dangling in the sky like so many Calder mobiles set adrift, Mr. Bou’s photographs may be the closest we’ll ever come to imagining the kind of art that, were they human, birds would make.

—Mr. Irmscher’s book “The Poetics of Natural History” is now available in a new edition, with photographs by Rosamond Purcell.