From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds comes 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, and 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 so-called “birdness,” such as a mother bird that kills her own baby sons and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own. There is a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species—ours—but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion. There are 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.
Ackerman draws 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. And she shows that 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.
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“From tales of dazzling plumage to anecdotes about almost unfathomable mimicry, Jennifer Ackerman’s The Bird Way is a walk through the mysteries, wonders, and peculiarities of the avian world…Her superb storytelling paints a rich picture that engages the reader’s imagination.”
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Science magazine