Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur (t)
Sy Montgomery
Language: English
Pages: 251
ISBN: 2:00334957
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Meet the ladies: a flock of smart, affectionate, highly individualistic chickens who visit their favorite neighbors, devise different ways to hide from foxes, and mob the author like she’s a rock star. In these pages you’ll also meet Maya and Zuni, two orphaned baby hummingbirds who hatched from eggs the size of navy beans, and who are little more than air bubbles fringed with feathers. Their lives hang precariously in the balance—but with human help, they may one day conquer the sky.
Snowball is a cockatoo whose dance video went viral on YouTube and who’s now teaching schoolchildren how to dance. You’ll meet Harris’s hawks named Fire and Smoke. And you’ll come to know and love a host of other avian characters who will change your mind forever about who birds really are.
Each of these birds shows a different and utterly surprising aspect of what makes a bird a bird—and these are the lessons of Birdology: that birds are far stranger, more wondrous, and at the same time more like us than we might have dared to imagine. In Birdology, beloved author of The Good Good Pig Sy Montgomery explores the essence of the otherworldly creatures we see every day. By way of her adventures with seven birds—wild, tame, exotic, and common—she weaves new scientific insights and narrative to reveal seven kernels of bird wisdom.
The first lesson of Birdology is that, no matter how common they are, Birds Are Individuals, as each of Montgomery’s distinctive Ladies clearly shows. In the leech-infested rain forest of Queensland, you’ll come face to face with a cassowary—a 150-pound, man-tall, flightless bird with a helmet of bone on its head and a slashing razor-like toenail with which it (occasionally) eviscerates people—proof that Birds Are Dinosaurs. You’ll learn from hawks that Birds Are Fierce; from pigeons, how Birds Find Their Way Home; from parrots, what it means that Birds Can Talk; and from 50,000 crows who moved into a small city’s downtown, that Birds Are Everywhere. They are the winged aliens who surround us.
Birdology explains just how very "other" birds are: Their hearts look like those of crocodiles. They are covered with modified scales, which are called feathers. Their bones are hollow. Their bodies are permeated with extensive air sacs. They have no hands. They give birth to eggs. Yet despite birds’ and humans’ disparate evolutionary paths, we share emotional and intellectual abilities that allow us to communicate and even form deep bonds. When we begin to comprehend who birds really are, we deepen our capacity to approach, understand, and love these otherworldly creatures. And this, ultimately, is the priceless lesson of Birdology: it communicates a heartfelt fascination and awe for birds and restores our connection to these complex, mysterious fellow creatures.
They’ll feed sick family members and will guard them until they get better; injured crows call to flock-mates, who rush to help and fend off predators. And crows are smart: McGill University animal behaviorist Louis Lefebvre, inventor of the world’s only comprehensive avian IQ index, ranks the crow family, the corvids (including about 120 species of crows, ravens, rooks, choughs, nutcrackers, jays, magpies, tree pies, and the African piapiacs), at the top of the list. Konrad Lorenz considered the
kitchen and stole an apple from her fruit bowl. Though she’s a busy silversmith rushing to leave on an out-of-town trip, Liz takes time to give me a list of cassowary hotspots. I’ll track them down once I get a rental car and a map. That’s the next thing I do, once I check into my motel. For now David is leaving me, rushing back to Atherton for an in-service refresher course in first aid. I’ll be alone in my quest for a dinosaur. I’ll have only four more days to find one. I begin my day with
better. It stays so calm that you might not even know that a hooded bird is alive. And in a sense, it is not. Putting a hood on a bird is like extinguishing a candle. But then Nancy performs a breathtaking act of magic. She pulls off the hood. Instantly, the inert sculpture comes vividly alive. The flame of his soul leaps to life. Brown with a pale head, he stands tall and alert as an officer at attention: his name is Sabretache, for an accoutrement of the British military uniform that hangs
with clay pots inside to accommodate nests of sticks, twigs, and grasses. Pigeon keeping spread into Europe with the expansion of the Roman Empire. From the Renaissance to the early 1800s, pigeons oversaw the flowering of European culture from special open towers with hipped roofs built just for them. Aristocrats adorned their properties with elaborate dovecotes resembling classical temples or medieval towers. The birds well deserved such luxury, for they had already been serving their human
only group with a race today. Within a 150-mile radius of where we sit, from Fall River, Massachusetts, to Cape Cod to New Hampshire, there must be two thousand homing pigeons out today, all trying to fly home. What goes on in the skies above us, unseen? Only one person witnesses the release: the liberator, which in this case is Art MacKinnon, whom I met one night at the pigeon club. When he turns the lever that opens all the cages at the release site, “they shoot out like water out of a hose,”