One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives

Written by Bernd Heinrich

Narrated by Rick Adamson

In One Wild Bird at a Time, Heinrich returns to his great love: close, day-to-day observations of individual wild birds. Heinrich's observations lead to fascinating questions - and sometimes startling discoveries. A great crested flycatcher bringing food to the young acts surreptitiously and is attacked by the mate. Why? A pair of Northern flickers hammering their nest-hole into the side of Heinrich's cabin delivers the opportunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings, and to make a related discovery about nest-cleaning. One of a clutch of redstart warbler babies fledges out of the nest from twenty feet above the ground, and lands on the grass below. It can't fly. What will happen next?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dreamscape Media Audio
• Release date: May 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781520006130

Bernd Heinrich

BERND HEINRICH is an acclaimed scientist and the author of numerous books, including the best-selling Winter World, Mind of the Raven, Why We Run, The Homing Instinct, and One Wild Bird at a Time. Among Heinrich's many honors is the 2013 PEN New England Award in nonfiction for Life Everlasting. He resides in Maine.

Reviews for One Wild Bird at a Time

[pennymck_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent read - I learned so much and it really encouraged me to observe and question bird behaviour much more closely

[picardyrose · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent reading for the end of the day. You can forget all about the world and concentrate on birds you otherwise would know nothing about. Very restful.

[meandmybooks-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Three and a half stars. Some chapters were better than others, but on the whole I enjoyed Heinrich's tales of his bird studies. Each chapter focuses on a particular sort of bird and on a certain aspect of that bird's behavior. There is a lot about nesting and raising babies, flock behavior, feeding, territoriality, etc. Heinrich's observations are spectacularly (okay, sometimes hilariously) specific. He counts daily bird poops in nests, tail bobs per minute, caterpillars carried per feeding trip, grams of fat under a bird's skin during its post mortem inspection (and number of pecks causing the death that resulted in a post mortem inspection), etc. He is obsessive. But engaging! His delight in nature is irresistible, and I appreciated the way he kept pointing out the way his observations of seemingly simple phenomena led to questions which he would initially pursue through looking at other people's research and then, often, continue to investigate through his own cleverly devised experiments. I listened to this as an audiobook read by Rick Adamson, and his reading was very pleasant.

[sraelling · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found the chapter about the crows to be the most interesting. Who knew that crows could be (have been) pets?

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This one was such a perfect fit for me, in my fledgling “birding” life and I was lucky to find it as an Audible Daily Deal.Each of these chapters, most take place at the author's remote Maine cabin, are portrait's of a particular bird or a group of birds. The first one involves a family of northern flickers, that have taken up residence, inside the walls of his cabin.We then move onto owls, woodcocks, phoebes, vireos and others.There is some humor here, but Heinrich's deep passion and painstaking drive to observe and understand the lives of our feathered friends, is evident on every page. This may not be of interest to all readers but if you appreciate nature, the great outdoors and an intimate look at birds, give this wonderful book a try. It looks like he has written many other books and I will be seeking these out, as well.