Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science, nature, and human biology for almost three decades. Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all. In every respect - in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behaviour - birds vary. They’re also revealing not only the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, and disturbing abilities we once considered uniquely our own - deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, and infanticide - but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play.ĭrawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, and survive. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and, lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviours.

‘There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.’ This is one scientist’s pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, here is a radical examination of the bird way of being and of recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds - how they live and how they think.

The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman