Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird by Tim Birkhead
Someone had recommended this book to me years ago, but it wasn’t widely available. Now it’s even on audible. The title is pretty accurate. This book talks about the senses of birds: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste and magnetic navigation.
Good parts about this book: full of amusing and fascinating factoids. Did you know that owls have asymmetrical skulls? Did you know that some cave-dwelling birds (guanacos) have both ecolocation and low-light vision? Did you know that the inside of a duck’s bill is so sensitive that if you gave it a bowl of gravel mixed with granola it could eat all the granola out? Did you know that kiwis have a sense of smell so accurate they can find food underground with millimeter-accuracy?
If you love birds and science, you’ll enjoy this book. I love birds, and always wanted to be a scientist, but this book convinced me that maybe it’s a good idea that I’m not a scientist. It wasn’t just the talk of climbing up guano-ridden cliffs, or freezing to death on arctic shores counting chicks, or watching as social birds start to kill each other from the stress of starvation, it was from casual lines like “and then they removed the bird’s eyes and tried the experiment again” or the scene when they talk about a scientist manually masturbating a bird to see if it experienced orgasm. Um. Wow.
It’s not a terribly technical book, having been written for non-science types, but there were sections with a little more hard data than I wanted. I disliked the narrator of the audible version. His intonation was so disaffected that I found myself almost nodding off, even when the material fascinated me. Because of this and because of the overly-detailed sections, I think this might be a better book to read rather than listen to.
