Bird : A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came from, and How They Live

by Tudge, Colin

• ISBN13: 9780307342041
• ISBN10: 0307342042
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-20
• Publisher: Crown

Summary

In this follow-up to his acclaimed work "The Tree," Tudge offers a delightful exploration of the fascinating world of birds. bw illustrations throughout.

Author Biography

COLIN TUDGE is the author of The Link, The Tree, The Variety of Life, and So Shall We Reap and a fellow of the Linnean Society of London. A former features editor for New Scientist and documentarian for the BBC, he is currently a full-time writer and public speaker. He lives in Oxford, England.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
A Different way of being
What It Means to Be a Flier	p. 3
How Birds Became	p. 27
Dramatis Personae
Keeping Track: The Absolute Need to Classify	p. 69
All the Birds in the World: An Annotated Cast List	p. 101
How Birds live their lives
The Eating Machine	p. 197
The World as an Oyster	p. 245
Idyll and Mayhem: The Sex Lives of Birds	p. 263
Families and Friends	p. 323
The Mind of Birds	p. 365
Birds and us
Living with Birds and Learning from Birds	p. 399
Epilogue: A Matter of Attitude	p. 421
Further Reading and Notes	p. 431
Acknowledgments	p. 437
Index	p. 439
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1
What It Means to Be a Flier


"All animals are equal," the ruling pigs declared in George Orwell's Animal Farm. "But," they added, "some animals are more equal than others."
All animals are equal no doubt in the eyes of God, and all that manage to survive at all in this difficult world are in some sense "equal." But some, by all objective measures, are far more impressive than others; and none, not even the mammals, the group to which we ourselves belong, quite match up to the birds. Birds have their shortcomings, to be sure, as flesh and blood must. But they are, nonetheless, a very superior form of life.
Above all, birds fly.
They are not the only animals that have taken to the air, of course. There are many gliders. Flying fish are remarkably adept, and various frogs and snakes and lizards contrive to parachute from tree to tree; and there is a variety of gliding mammals, including phalangers and squirrels and colugos (sometimes known as flying lemurs). But only four groups have managed powered flight, driving themselves through the air by flapping or whirring their wings. Many insects fly wonderfully. Bats fly well enough to catch insects in the air--and, for good measure, they do it at night. The ancient pterosaurs, contemporaries of the dinosaurs, included some of the biggest powered fliers of all time--and what a sight they must have been! Pelicans, returning home against the evening sun, might give us some idea of what they were like.
But none of these creatures flies as well as the birds. Perhaps this is why birds are still with us and pterosaurs are not. Perhaps this is why bats fly mainly at night; if they are ever forced to fly by day, as they may do in cold weather when there are too few nighttime insects, they quickly get picked off by hawks.
Flight, indeed, is the key to birds. Many have abandoned flight, of course, like penguins and Ostriches, and there are or have been flightless ducks and geese, many flightless rails and auks, at least one flightless ibis, flightless cormorants, and flightless parrots. The famous Dodo was a flightless pigeon, and there was even one flightless passerine (a perching bird)--or so it's said, though it is hard to tell, since the bird is extinct. But all of these flightless types had flying ancestors. Some birds fly but ineptly--including the superficially grouse-like tinamous of South America, which hurtle along with huge bravado but little control, and sometimes end up killing themselves, like twelve-year-old joyriders. On the whole, sensibly, tinamous prefer to stay on the ground.
The fact that birds fly--or at least are descended from ancestors that were adapted to flight--dominates all aspects of their lives. Flight brings huge and obvious advantages, but it is also immensely demanding and so has its downside, too.


WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A FLYING MACHINE


As a mammal, I have often admired and envied birds--as who has not?
I remember once, in southern Spain, struggling over the rocks to get to the base of some cliff to catch a glimpse of the Egyptian Vultures that in the evening appear over the edge, riding along the length of it on the up-currents--not for any obvious reason, since it is too late to feed at that time of day but just, it seems, to keep an eye on things, like the squire riding his estate.
After half an hour or so the vultures did turn up. Birds in general have big eyes--their skulls are built around the orbits--and in birds of prey they are particularly big. The eyes of a big eagle are as big as a human's. In birds of prey (and in some other birds such as kingfishers and swallows), the retina has two foveas (particularly sensitive spots), and the eyes as a whole have a greater concentration of light-gathering, color-sensitive cones than any other vertebrate. So the visual acuity of a hawk or a vulture is two or three times as great as ours. Australia's huge Wedge-tailed Eagle has been shown to see rabbits c

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Excerpted from The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came from, and How They Live by Colin Tudge
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.