Acclaimed scientist studies "One Wild Bird at a Time"

 

Just started reading this book, which was recently released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to review this book by acclaimed scientist Bernd Heinrich.

Here's a description from Goodreads:


In his modern classics One Man’s Owl and Mind of the Raven, Bernd Heinrich has written memorably about his relationships with wild ravens and a great horned owl. In One Wild Bird at a Time, Heinrich returns to his great love: close, day-to-day observations of individual wild birds. 

There are countless books on bird behavior, but Heinrich argues that some of the most amazing bird behaviors fall below the radar of what most birds do in aggregate. 

Heinrich’s “passionate observations [that] superbly mix memoir and science” (New York Times Book Review) lead to fascinating questions — and sometimes startling discoveries. A great crested flycatcher, while bringing food to the young in their nest, is attacked by the other flycatcher nearby. Why? A pair of Northern flickers hammering their nest-hole into the side of Heinrich’s cabin deliver the opportunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings, and to make a related discovery about nest-cleaning. One of a clutch of redstart warbler babies fledges out of the nest from twenty feet above the ground, and lands on the grass below. It can’t fly. What will happen next?   

Heinrich “looks closely, with his trademark ‘hands-and-knees science’ at its most engaging, [delivering] what can only be called psychological marvels of knowing” (Boston Globe).   

An eminent biologist shares the joys of bird-watching and how observing the anomalous behaviors of individual birds has guided his research.

An engaging memoir of the opportunities for doing scientific research without leaving one's own backyard. (Kirkus)