Bird Sense
What It's Like to Be a Bird
-
- £11.99
-
- £11.99
Publisher Description
What is it like to be a swift, flying at over one hundred kilometres an hour? Or a kiwi, plodding flightlessly among the humid undergrowth in the pitch dark of a New Zealand night? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise?
Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other. Our affinity for birds is often said to be the result of shared senses - vision and hearing - but how exactly do their senses compare with our own? And what about a birds' sense of taste, or smell, or touch or the ability to detect the earth's magnetic field? Or the extraordinary ability of desert birds to detect rain hundreds of kilometres away - how do they do it?
Bird Sense is based on a conviction that we have consistently underestimated what goes on in a bird's head. Our understanding of bird behaviour is simultaneously informed and constrained by the way we watch and study them. By drawing attention to the way these frameworks both facilitate and inhibit discovery, it identifies ways we can escape from them to seek new horizons in bird behaviour.
There has never been a popular book about the senses of birds. No one has previously looked at how birds interpret the world or the way the behaviour of birds is shaped by their senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of observation and an understanding of birds and their behaviour that is firmly grounded in science.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With clear gusto for his subject, animal behavior expert Birkhead (The Wisdom of Birds) breaks down what it might be like to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell as a bird. Tracing the insights, clever experiments, and surprise contributions that have helped debunk myths about birds' senses, he takes us to Caripe, Venezuela, where a Harvard undergrad discovered that the cave-dwelling gu charo can navigate in total darkness via echolocation, and introduces us to Betsy Bang, the amateur ornithologist who persuaded the scientific community in the 1960s that birds can smell. After walking us through the five familiar senses that birds share with humans, he also shows how they may be able to orient themselves by the earth's magnetic field using magnetite crystals within their beaks or even by seeing the field, the way we might a cloud or a tree. And he considers less tangible feelings, too. Although little is known about birds' emotions, Birkhead makes reasonable behavior-based guesses about what a bird might feel when glimpsing a predator, losing a skirmish with a rival, or reuniting with a mate. The well-organized book takes pains to explain any avian jargon, making for an uncomplicated, entertaining read perfect for birdwatchers and animal enthusiasts.
