The acclaimed scientist’s encounters with individual wild birds, yielding “marvelous, mind-altering” (Los Angeles Times) insights and discoveries
In One Wild Bird at a Time, Heinrich returns to his great love: close, day-to-day observations of individual wild birds. Heinrich’s observations lead to fascinating questions—and sometimes startling discoveries. A great crested flycatcher bringing food to the young acts surreptitiously and is attacked by the mate. Why? A pair of Northern flickers hammering their nest-hole into the side of Heinrich’s cabin delivers the opportunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings and to make a related discovery about nest cleaning. One of a clutch of redstart warbler babies fledges out of the nest from twenty feet above the ground and lands on the grass below. It can’t fly. What will happen next?
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“An eminent biologist shares the joys of bird-watching and…smoothly describes how studying the daily lives of birds in their natural environments allows him to experience their world vicariously…Bird watching has been an important part of his life since he was a boy on his family’s farm. When he was six, they moved from Germany to Maine. Finding familiar birds nesting ‘immediately made this place our home,’ he writes. An engaging memoir of the opportunities for doing scientific research without leaving one’s own backyard.”
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Kirkus Reviews