Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

By Tim Birkhead

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 birds' 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, it identifies ways we can escape from them to seek 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 their senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of observation and an understanding of birds and their behaviour that is firmly grounded in science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781408828717

Tim Birkhead

Tim Birkhead FRS is an author and biologist, emeritus Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield, one of Britain's foremost ornithologists, and a leading light in popular science communication. His professional interests span ornithology, evolution and reproductive biology, as well as the history of science. He is known for his work on both the mating systems of birds and the history of ornithology. He has also led one of the world's best-known long-term research projects, studying the biology and population dynamics of Britain's auks and other seabirds. Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004, Tim's awards include the Elliot Coues Medal for outstanding contributions to ornithological research, the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour medal, the BOU's Godman-Salvin Medal, for distinguished ornithological work, the Zoological Society of London's Silver Medal, and the Stephen Jay Gould Prize. Tim has written or edited 15 books, including four popular science titles published by Bloomsbury – The Wisdom of Birds (2008), Bird Sense (2012), The Most Perfect Thing (2017) and The Wonderful Mr Willughby (Bloomsbury 2018), with his latest work devoted to the life and afterlife of a true icon of extinction, The Great Auk (2024).

Reviews for Bird Sense

[emmakendon_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was given to me as a gift because I'd really enjoyed "The Wisdom of Birds". What I'd loved about that book, and what stays in my mind, is the fun you have reading about people's superstitions, wrong conclusions and interaction with birds, be it barnacle geese or hanging up kingfishers to tell which way the wind will blow. "Bird Sense" also has its collection of people to enjoy, including John James Audubon- known to me thanks to greetings cards featuring birds like the large-billed puffin. But it also felt more scholarly, and more interesting about actual senses and physiology, such as owls' unevenly distributed ears and the way hawks take in so much information so much more quickly than we do (except during traffic accidents when we're about Even Stevens...). I could have done with some more illustrations to help me envisage what he was explaining, lovely as Katrina van Grouw's are - but then maybe that's also what was so beautiful about "The Wisdom of Birds" - it was such a gorgeous indulgence of a book!

[mrslee_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

All about the senses of birds and how we know they have them. If you can't bear to eat animals, you may not enjoy reading about the things scientists do to them to understand them. Bird Sense is detailed in the extreme. It said it was written for amateurs; well I suppose I'm whatever is before amateur. Mildly interested maybe? I think the information is the sort I would rather read in a glossy magazine with color photos and charts and graphs and little paragraphs to explain. It was interesting. At times it seemed to be more about the scientific method than about actual bird senses. It took over an hour on the audio to even begin to hear about birds, which kinda killed any interest my husband had. As you can probably tell, I endured this book rather than enjoyed it, but it was an interesting subject, and so I listened until the end.

[carolee888 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have been fascinated by birds all my life so I latched on to this book right away. Also, I took a year of animal behavior in college plus lab for a semester and also took a course in physiological psychology. Why am I telling you that? Because this book does use a lot of technical terms and refers to history of research behind each topic, I think that without an interest in birds, a reader might get discouraged or even bored but without a background in the technical terms, a reader may be lost or spend some time with the glossary in the back of the book.This book is divided into different topics: Seeing, Hearing, Touch, Taste, Smell, Magnetic Sense and Emotions. Besides the glossary in the back, there is a section on notes with references, a bibliography, and index and a postscript. My favorite chapter in this book is the one on Seeing. I had read recently in an article on the Internet that birds see more colors than we do. Humans have three different kinds of photoreceptors or commonly called cones. Ours are red, green and blue so all the colors that we perceive from those kinds of cones. But birds have the same cones but ultraviolent in addition. Because I don't know enough about UV light this fact makes me feel like I am fishing in the dark. I have cockatiels as pets. When I come home from my UVB treatment (as prescribed by a dermatologist) can they actually see a difference in me? Reading the information from the research prompted many interesting questions.Here are just some of the questions that this book answers:Can birds fly and sleep at the same time?How can raptors see in very dim light?What part of bird ears can grow back?What career would John James Audubon have followed if he had obeyed his father's wishes?What could prompt a bird to murder another bird?I recommend this book to all bird lovers and people who really want to know how birds perceive the world.I received this book from the Amazon Vine Program and that in no way influenced my review.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am a bit of a bird nerd, so this book definitely piqued my curiosity. The author examines birds' senses, from the "basic five" to magnetic sense, and even emotions. I picked up several fun facts along the way: did you know birds' internal organs undergo seasonal changes? The centres in the avian brain that control the acquisition and delivery of song in male birds shrink at the end of the breeding season and grow again in the following spring. The brain is expensive to run – in humans it uses about ten times as much energy as any other organ – so, for birds, shutting down those parts not needed at certain times of the year is a sensible energy-saving tactic.I also enjoyed the chapter on smell. Only recently have scientists confirmed birds do indeed have a sense of smell, and there is still much to study and learn. This book is written much more for the lay person than a scientist, which was fine with me because I'm not a scientist. Despite that, I would have enjoyed going deeper into some of the research, and also wanted to know more about areas of current scientific debate.