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What it's like to be a bird?
Bloomsbury
March 2012
On Sale: March 1, 2012
289 pages
ISBN: 1408820137
EAN: 9781408820131
Kindle: B007DD8GRQ
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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 bird's 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, Birkhead identifies ways
we can escape from them to explore 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 all
their senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided
Tim Birkhead with a wealth of observation and a unique
understanding of birds and their behaviour that is firmly
grounded in science.
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