The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

Ms Ackerman’s book is like an encyclopedia filled to the brim with impressive and startling facts! It is an easy read and I found it hard to put down.If you are a bird fancier, or someone who just wants to know more about animals that you see and live around every day, this is the book for you. I came away more informed than I ever imagined and anxious to watch my bird neighbors with a new found perspective!

This is nature writing at its very best. Journalist Jennifer Ackerman has emerged as one of the leading voices for our avian friends. She travels the world to introduce us to some amazing birds and the painstaking research being done to better understand them. I lost count of the number of times I wrote “wow” in my marginalia.North American birds are on the whole somewhat boring, but in Australia, New Zealand and the tropics, their behavior is even more distinctive than their often colorful plumage. From laughing and tool making to cooperative parenting, birds have more going on upstairs than I ever imagined. I also thought I had learned about the birds and the bees long ago, but I don’t remember studying their “cloaca” (a three-in-one orifice).Perhaps I will develop the patience to go bird watching when I am in my 70s, but in the meantime, I have put out feeders and birdbaths. Two of our most frequent flyers are acorn woodpeckers, which have “one of the most complex communal nesting systems of any vertebrate” (p. 319) and Anna’s hummingbirds, which Ackerman wonderfully describes as “a ton of truculence packed into a feathered fraction of an ounce” (p. 13). While reading outside they can hover inches from my face. Males have dazzling ruby red throats when light is reflected at certain angles. Feeding frenzies are punctuated by dogfights and dive bombings. Just as I was reading Ackerman’s description, a female hummer crashed into the sliding glass door of my study. I scooped her up and marveled at how tiny she was. Before I could offer her some sugar water, she had flown off into our nearby redbud tree.“The Bird Way” is a welcome respite from a world turned upside down by Trump’s kakocracy (rule by the worst people). Corvids (crows) over Covid-19! My next bird books will be the lighter “The Birds of Pandemonium: Life Among the Exotic and the Endangered” and the more academic “Parrots of the Wild: A Natural History of the World’s Most Captivating Birds.” Ackerman has a brilliant chapter on New Zealand’s stupendous kea parrot, but I need to better understand the yellow-naped Amazon I grew up with. Poncho could outlive me...

If you have even the most passing interest in what these dinosaur holdovers can do, you’ll want to read this book. Despite their brain size, birds plan, communicate, organize, and cooperate, even though they may be of different species. Jennifer Ackerman has pulled together fascinating research about birds demonstrating they have lives full of social complexity, requiring skills and abilities, humans are just now beginning to recognize.Ackerman breaks down her book into sections that detail bird communication, work, play, and parenting. Contained within each chapter are stories and observations from bird experts, and scientists who show birds are far more sophisticated than we ever thought. There are the keas who engage in play like kids let loose on a jungle gym, the cowbirds and cuckoos who place their eggs surreptitiously in others’ nests for other birds to raise, and the New Caledonian crows that construct tools to get to the food. Some birds mimic others to fool predators and display to potential mates their desirability. One species, the Carolina chickadee, can make the sound of a copperhead to keep predators at bay while they are nesting.All in all, this is a book that will make you respect and appreciate the complexity of bird behavior as well as create a delightful sense of wonder at all we have not understood about them. Besides bird lovers’, I recommend this book to anyone interested in the natural world and wanting to recognize better some of the avian behavior observable in their own backyards.

Ever wonder how, with their relatively tiny brains, birds can learn, communicate and function at a much higher level than one would predict. Turns out, their brains are organized differently - and clearly much more efficiently. From this book, you'll learn about the amazing ways birds avoid nest parasitism (e.g., a cuckoo dumping its own egg into a nest, and when its offspring hatches, it pushes the rightful occupants out of the next to die). Some birds teach their unhatched "children" a code song, learned while still in the egg, without which they won't be fed. Others memorize the speckled pattern of their own eggs and will discard any with unrecognized patterns. Still others keep careful count of how many eggs were laid and will abandon the nest if an "extra" appears. Perceptual and learning abilities rival and often surpass those of primates whose brains weigh more than the whole bird. African grey parrots have the cognitive and emotional facilities of preschoolers. A worthy and fascinating read.

This book gets a “two thumbs up” from my father the lifelong amateur naturalist. I gave it to him as a Christmas present. I chose the hardback edition both because of the drawings and because he enjoys hardback books when the book is meant for “continuous browsing” meaning both for reading and for revisiting as a resource. He knows quite a bit about birds and absolutely loves this book. He told me that it’s very well written, engaging, absorbing, interesting, and the drawings are lovely. When I asked him if a “beginning bird enthusiast” would also enjoy the book he said, “Absolutely! It’s very accessible and they’ll learn so much about birds.”If you like/love birds or know someone who does and you want to add a book to yours or their collection that’s more than the standard bird identification book, this is definitely the book to get or give as a present.

Product utilized for learning about our avian friends. Very informative!

Great book, I'm really enjoying reading it.

I recommend this book not only to all birdlovers, but to anyone who likes to learn more about behaviors, evolution and what moves and motivates these fascinating animals. Easy to read.

Al principio me costó meterme en él, porque describe el mundo de las aves en zonas bastante distintas a la mía: Australia y Nueva Zelandia sobre todo. El uso de unidades anglosajonas tampoco ayudaba. Pero una vez metida en las historias de tan increíbles animales, lo he disfrutado muchísimo. También me he reído un montón con las historias de cuervos y loros. Lo he leído en inglés, así que he tenido que recurrir bastante a google para visualizar algunos de los pájaros descritos. Muy recomendable. Incluso si no eres amante de las aves.

Amazing book

This is the second of Jennifer Ackerman's books that I have in my library. It reads well and has many examples of Australian bird behaviour as well as foreign birds. A good book for those interested in finding out about the way birds play, love, talk, think and the way they look after their young (or don't in the case of parasitic cuckoos).