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Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur
Simon & Schuster
April 2010
On Sale: April 6, 2010
272 pages
ISBN: 1416569847
EAN: 9781416569848
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Meet the ladies: a flock of smart, affectionate, highly
individualistic chickens who visit their favorite neighbors,
devise different ways to hide from foxes, and mob the author
like she’s a rock star. In these pages you’ll also meet Maya
and Zuni, two orphaned baby hummingbirds who hatched from
eggs the size of navy beans, and who are little more than
air bubbles fringed with feathers. Their lives hang
precariously in the balance—but with human help, they may
one day conquer the sky. Snowball is a cockatoo whose
dance video went viral on YouTube and who’s now teaching
schoolchildren how to dance. You’ll meet Harris’s hawks
named Fire and Smoke. And you’ll come to know and love a
host of other avian characters who will change your mind
forever about who birds really are. Each of these
birds shows a different and utterly surprising aspect of
what makes a bird a bird—and these are the lessons of
Birdology: that birds are far stranger, more
wondrous, and at the same time more like us than we might
have dared to imagine. In Birdology, beloved author
of The Good Good Pig Sy Montgomery explores the
essence of the otherworldly creatures we see every day. By
way of her adventures with seven birds—wild, tame, exotic,
and common—she weaves new scientific insights and narrative
to reveal seven kernels of bird wisdom. The first
lesson of Birdology is that, no matter how common
they are, Birds Are Individuals, as each of Montgomery’s
distinctive Ladies clearly shows. In the leech-infested rain
forest of Queensland, you’ll come face to face with a
cassowary—a 150-pound,man-tall, flightless bird with a
helmet of bone on its head and a slashing razor-like toenail
with which it (occasionally) eviscerates people—proof that
Birds Are Dinosaurs. You’ll learn from hawks that Birds Are
Fierce; from pigeons, how Birds Find Their Way Home; from
parrots, what it means that Birds Can Talk; and from 50,000
crows who moved into a small city’s downtown, that Birds Are
Everywhere. They are the winged aliens who surround us.
Birdology explains just how very
"other" birds are: Their hearts look like those of
crocodiles. They are covered with modified scales, which are
called feathers. Their bones are hollow. Their bodies are
permeated with extensive air sacs. They have no hands. They
give birth to eggs. Yet despite birds’ and humans’ disparate
evolutionary paths, we share emotional and intellectual
abilities that allow us to communicate and even form deep
bonds. When we begin to comprehend who birds really are, we
deepen our capacity to approach, understand, and love these
otherworldly creatures. And this, ultimately, is the
priceless lesson of Birdology: it communicates a
heartfelt fascination and awe for birds and restores our
connection to these complex, mysterious fellow creatures.
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