Bird Sense: What It's Like To Be A Bird

Author: Tim Birkhead

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General Fields

  • : 25.00 NZD
  • : 9781408830543
  • : Bloomsbury
  • : Bloomsbury Pb
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  • : 0.204
  • : March 2013
  • : 198mm X 129mm
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  • : books

Special Fields

  • :
  • :
  • : Tim Birkhead
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  • : Paperback
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  • : English
  • : 598
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  • : Black and white
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Barcode 9781408830543
9781408830543

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.

Promotion info

A hugely engaging book about birds, their senses and behaviour that is informed by an attractive blend of personal experience, entertaining stories and cutting-edge science.

Reviews

An absolutely absorbing book, on almost every page there is an astonishing observation or revelation - Peter Parker Daily Telegraph


 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 - Christopher Hart Sunday Times


A joy to read, simultaneously fascinating and hilarious ... a book that is thoughtful, thoroughly researched and engagingly written throughout - Jamie Condliffe New Scientist


 

Author description

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.