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 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 & 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.