Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

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.

About the Author :
Tim Birkhead is a professor at the University of Sheffield where he teaches animal behaviour and the history of science. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and his research has taken him all over the world in the quest to understand the lives of birds. He has written for The Independent, New Scientist, BBC Wildlife. Among his other books are Promiscuity, Great Auk Islands, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Birds which won the McColvin medal, The Red Canary which won the Consul Cremer Prize and The Wisdom of Birds. He is married with three children and lives in Sheffield.

Review :
Touching An absolutely absorbing book. On almost every page there is an astonishing observation or revelation. ***** Combining a wealth of bird facts with a winning modesty in the face of these creatures’ essential mysteriousness, Bird Sense is a richly persuasive volume. This fascinating book has much to teach us, not just about what it means to be a bird, but about the rewards and responsibilities of our coexistence with these wonderful creatures We’ll never know what it’s really like to be a bird but Tim Birkhead’s readable book takes us as far as science can take us, through an examination of how birds see, hear, smell and taste their world An eye-opening guide to all matters ornithological ... His tour of the frontiers of our understanding of birds is stuffed with mind-boggling facts and insights. Thoroughly engaging, it also gives us a thrilling sense of the vast, unmapped territories that lie beyond, waiting to be discovered Chirpy and fascinating study about the mysteries of bird behaviour If you have ever wondered what it is like to be a bird then Tim Birkhead's wonderful book Bird Sense looks at the sensory apparatus of birds and how they interpret the world Inspired ... bringing together of all the latest scientific research on avian sight, sound, touch and taste as well as smell, along with some senses which are beyond human capabilities altogether ... if you pick up Bird Sense, however wise you think you are, you'll learn something new Combining a wealth of bird facts with a winning modesty in the face of these creatures' essential mysteriousness, Bird Sense is a richly persuasive volume ... This fascinating book has much to teach us, not just about what it means to be a bird, but about the rewards and responsibilities of our coexistence with these wonderful creatures The effect of his brisk but sparklingly lucid pages is to refocus the point of view on to us and force a rethink as to what it's like to be a human sharing the earth with such wonderfully different and yet recognisably similar animals A collective portrait of birds that is deeply stirring and inspires awe at our own species and its capacity for such intense curiosity Like astronomy, ornithology is a science to which amateurs have made authentic contributions. Today, however, the divide between amateurs and professionals in ornithology appears to be deepening, as the professionals revolutionize our understanding of the ornithological family tree and of bird behaviour by employing cellular biology and the chemistry of DNA. Tim Birkhead, professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Sheffield, in Britain, has a remarkable capacity to bridge the gap ... His skill lies in the way he poses his questions No book has made me want to quote incredible facts about the feathered creatures that inhabit our planet quite like Tim Birkhead’s masterpiece Bird Sense. Be prepared to be amazed