Pluck

From the New York Times bestselling author of What an Owl Knows, The Genius of Birds, and The Bird Way, the first, groundbreaking investigation about how female birds live

Recent studies about female birds upend everything we thought we knew about birds. Until now, research focused almost exclusively on the male half of the class. But female Northern Cardinals learn their songs three times faster. Female House Wrens can be even more aggressive. Female birds in general also often have entirely different migratory patterns and are quicker to adapt to climate change. They talk to their young when they are still in the egg and even chirp “passwords” to their nestlings that signify safety. 

Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about birds for over twenty years and grew up with the conventional wisdom found in field guides and bird books. According to them, females were drab and passive. They didn’t sing. They were good mothers, sitting faithfully on their eggs, tending and feeding their young. Nothing could be further from the truth. From ice-filled New Hampshire lakes to the deep recesses of the Amazonian jungles, female birds are both more like males than we thought—capable of typical male behaviors like aggression, competition, complex song, and sexual assertiveness—and less like them, with radically different ways of living and surviving than their male counterparts, wildly different skills, opportunities, and risks.

Why have we gotten things so wrong? What has held science back on the female front? It is important that we find out, for as Ackerman writes, “conservation planning has long been aimed at protecting male-dominated habitats.” Some female birds have lost almost twice as much ground as the males over the past few decades. Bird lovers will receive no better gift than this extraordinary chance to fly higher and further than was ever possible before, to see all birds, and then save them, too.