The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman

The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think.

There is the mammal way and there is the bird way. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries -- What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play.

Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species--ours--but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call--and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter.

Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska's Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.

For than three decades, JENNIFER ACKERMAN has been writing about science, nature, and human biology. Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body; Ah-Choo: The Unusual Life of Your Common Cold; Chance in the Mansion of Fate: A Natural History of Heredity; and Notes from the Sea are among her most recent works. Ackerman has written for Scientific American, National Geographic, The New York Times, and many other magazines. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship in Nonfiction, a Bunting Fellowship, and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant. The Sloan Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780735223011
ISBN 10	0735223017
Title	The Bird Way
Author	Jennifer Ackerman
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2020-05-05
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.