Beaks, Bones and Bird Songs: How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior by Roger Lederer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Compact and Fascinating Overview of Birds Beaks, Bones, and Bird Songs (2016) by Roger Lederer is all about its subtitle: How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior. Lederer covers Foraging, Sensory Abilities, Flight, Migration and Navigation, Survival Strategies for Weather, Communities, and Human Influence. The book percolates with interesting information on birds in general and on particular species. As he proceeds, Lederer also covers a bit of the history of ornithology, citing earlier landmark studies and explanations of birds that according to contemporary science are either woefully incorrect or still accurate. Throughout, the main point Lederer repeatedly demonstrates is that birds are amazing creatures of incredible diversity in their habitats, sizes, shapes, physiologies, lifestyles, abilities, and so on. While being perfectly adapted to their environments over millennia and even millions of years, birds’ existence is increasingly threatened and changed by human activity (cities, habitat degradation, hunting, etc. etc.). Everyday life is a struggle for survival which birds negotiate with all their intelligence, learning, and senses, making choices about how and where and when to forage for food, to nest and raise young, and to migrate, etc., all to maximize chances for success and minimize chances for failure. Although he does not push a didactic conservation agenda, he does reveal ways in which humans harmfully or helpfully affect avian life and concludes that “We have to be partners with birds.” Here are some examples of the interesting things I learned from the book: Why birds don’t have teeth and how gizzards partially replace them. How sandpipers detect prey deep in sandy mud without seeing or smelling them. Why woodpeckers don’t get headaches. Why vultures defecate on their feet and have bald heads. How birds see colors and UV etc. and use one eye or both eyes etc. Why birds sing (it’s not for joy). How birds fly (including soaring, gliding, diving, etc.). How flocks and formations work (including how birds in dense flocks avoid flying into each other). Why some birds migrate (and how they know when to go and how they fly such long distances). How birds use sun maps, star maps, geomagnetic crystals, olfaction, infrasound, and landmarks to navigate. How birds adjust their body temperatures to deal with cold and heat. How and why birds mob (gang up on larger predators). The Arctic Tern flies to the Antarctic and back, up to 66,000 miles per year, enough for three round trips to the moon if they live full life spans. Acorn woodpeckers wedge acorns into trees so tightly that no other animals or birds can remove them, so they themselves can later break them open to get the nuts. If other jays see them hiding their acorn caches, they’ll hide them again later, but only if they themselves are cache robbers. Babies still in eggs tell parents to turn them right side up or make them warmer etc. In each ecosystem and niche and guild, each bird plays a particular role in relationships with the other living parts of the environment. Birds can get drunk on fermented fruit. Diversity in an ecosystem is necessary, like a sophisticated and complicated watch with many functions and parts: remove enough of the parts and it will finally stop working. Evolution and natural selection are good at making creatures change to suit changing environments etc., but since industrial revolution the pace of change has outstripped what evolution can do. Birds in cities develop differently (behavior, color, wing size, song frequency, egg laying, singing, migrating or not, viability, etc.) from the same species in the country. Global warming is making birds migrate earlier and fly farther north and breed earlier, etc. Anyone interested in birds should read this book, though perhaps ornithologists and other experts might not find as much new interesting information as I did. The audiobook reader Charles Constant is professional and smooth, though perhaps he reads a touch more speedily than I’d have liked. View all my reviews
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