Bird Sense cover art

Bird Sense

What It's Like to Be a Bird

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Bird Sense

By: Tim Birkhead
Narrated by: Robin Sachs
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About this listen

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? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise?

Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other. Our affinity for birds is often said to be the result of shared senses - vision and hearing - but how exactly do their senses compare with our own? And what about a bird's 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 and constrained by the way we watch and study them. By drawing attention to the way these frameworks both facilitate and inhibit discovery, Birkhead identifies ways we can escape from them to explore 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 all their senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of observation and a unique understanding of birds and their behaviour that is firmly grounded in science.

©2012 Tim Birkhead (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
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A comprehensive answer

Where does Bird Sense rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

If you have ever wondered what it's like to be a bird this book is a must. Details like why a falcon's eyesight is so good (because the eyeball has two foviae as opposed to a human's one). And did you know that relative to body size, the size of bird's eyes are almost twice as large as those of most mammals? Even with a distaste for biology this book easily held my attention...sound localisation, taste, smell, magnetic sense, emotions, it's all there. And all very well done and ranks among the best.

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Excellent summary of knowledge

This was an excellent summary of the current(ish) knowledge of bird senses. Engagingly written and well structured, it provides a pretty comprehensive examination of what is known. For me it was a great introduction into a topic I didn’t know much about. It is quite academic, so is targeted at people who are keen to know the details of what it is like to be a bird.

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