France, April 13 -- A new book released in France explores how ornitherapy and sylvotherapy - linked to the birds and the trees - can have a positive effect on human health and wellbeing, with some doctors in the UK and the US even prescribing them to patients.

Here's a little experiment: go outside and listen to the birds singing. Give it a few minutes. How do you feel? Better?

You've just administered yourself ornitherapy: therapy using birds. Ornitherapie is the title of a book just released in France, by Elise Rousseau and Philippe Dubois. The latter is an environmental engineer and ornithologist, whom RFI met with in the Parc Montsouris in Paris, where it was sunny and the birds were singing.

Ornithotherapy, Dubois says, is based ...