Bird Sense

What It's Like to Be a Bird

By: Tim Birkhead

Narrated by: Robin Sachs

Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

Narrator is clueless

This was such a frustrating listen. It's like someone told the narrator "this is non-fiction...just use no inflection". He never varied even when you knew the author was making a reference that NEEDED inflection.
Paraphrasing here:
"I went to the Florida Everglades - home of rednecks and Deliverance - to look at birds."
Our narrator read it as if this were a fact contained in the sentence "birds have wings and can fly" instead of with wry humor. There are so many instances of this! I feel bad for the author and hope he never listened to this. Who vets these narrators? Does the author have any say in how they interpret his words?

The content was interesting and deepened my knowledge of birds. But it was a slog to get through.

entertaining

not only did I learn quite a bit about birds, it was also laugh out loud funny. Good reader and good writer.

super interesting content super boring narrator.

I wish I had read the book instead. The narrator is almost sinfully boring and monotone.

Wet Your Beak a Little

This book is for bird watchers and nature buffs, like me. We read/listen not just for entertainment but to also mine bits of information to impress our friends and make them jealous. Here are bits pulled from Mr. Birkhead’s book: Pigeons navigate by detecting the magnetic pole through molecules of magnetite imbedded in their right eye. The brain areas of neo-tropical songbirds concerned with sound swell during nesting season, then shrink the rest of the year to save energy. Tiny hummingbirds have two areas of great visual acuity at the back of their retina, the same as hawks. Cave-dwelling oilbirds echolocate like bats, but not as well. Kiwis can hardly see but probe with a bill so sensitive it not only smells earthworms but senses their body mass under the dirt. Owl ears are fine tuned to pick up the higher resonances made by rodents. The inside of ducks’ bills are lined with nerves that separate food from grit in a split second as the birds dabble. And so on, and so on. The author is a British ornithologist who specializes in seabirds, but gives information about a range of different types. He writes well and the narration is good. Use the book to increase your personal bird knowledge.

A comprehensive answer

Any additional comments?

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.

Must read for bird lovers

Any additional comments?

Very informative, although somewhat dry. I enjoyed it and thought it was very on point and in depth at the time I read it. If you have little interest in birds and/or animal anatomy and behavior, this book isn’t for you. However, for the science-minded animal lover, it comes highly recommended.

Great info

As a person who lives with, admires and works with birds this was very informative. Truly appreciate getting answers to some of my questions, even if it was not species specific.

The science of the science of bird senses

This book not only tells you what the birds experience, but how we know what they experience. There are many interesting facts both about birds and the pioneers that discovered those facts and what experiments uncovered them. It's organized by sense, which I thought was helpful in visualizing bird life. If you like books that make the world around you more interesting, this is the book for you.

Fascinating facts about birds

If you like learning cool facts about animal behavior, you'll love this book. Full of surprising information on how various species of bird perceive the world, and how that drives their behavior. Good narrator, kept my interest.

How science is so much FUN

I actually selected this book because I love Robin Sachs, and he did not disappoint here.

I am not an avid birder but I pay attention to what I see; like to recognize species, and am fascinated to understand the behavior of birds and other animals in the wild. But Birkhead takes the reader behind the scenes for a clear and intriguing look at how we know what we know and the ingenuity of the people who figured things out. The correspondence -- over the course of centuries -- among people studying birds gives a wonderful personal sense of the individuals and their quests.

Yes, this is definitely about the scientific process, but it's described clearly and eloquently. In the process, we get to see and understand the dazzling variety of birds' evolutionary solutions to living in the extremes of settings and environments.

I liked the listen so much I've ordered a hard copy to return to and to share with like-minded friends.