Bird Sense

Product 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? & what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings & how does its brain improvise? Bird Sense addresses questions like these & many more by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment & to interact with each other. Our affinity for birds is often said to be the result of shared senses
- vision & hearing
- but how exactly do their senses compare with our own? & what about a birds sense of taste or smell or touch or the ability to detect the earths 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 birds head. Our understanding of bird behaviour is simultaneously informed & constrained by the way we watch & study them. By drawing attention to the way these frameworks both facilitate & 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 & an understanding of birds & their behaviour that is firmly grounded in science.