The Bird Way

Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science and nature for three decades. She is the author of eight books, including The Genius of Birds, which has been translated into twenty languages and the forthcoming The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think. Her articles and essays have appeared in Scientific American, National Geographic, The New York Times, and many other publications, Ackerman is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Nonfiction, a Bunting Fellowship, and a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think.

There is the mammal way and there is the bird way. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play.

Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species ours but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter.

Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska s Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR: THE GENIUS OF BIRDS was a NYT bestseller, and continues to sell successfully in paperback. THE BIRD WAY continues to be the perfect follow up for her loyal readers.NEW SCIENCE: Birds perform surprising and sometimes alarming behaviors daily-activities that gleefully reverse conventional notions about what we thought they were capable of. Birds that create gorgeous works of art, and birds that destroy the creations of other birds. One charismatic bird that forcibly kidnaps other birds; another with a reputation for solemnity that is strongly addicted to play; one that impales its prey on thorns, but sings so beautifully that composers have devised compositions around its songs.DELIGHTFUL READ: Ackerman draws on personal observations and reflections, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, which makes for a compelling meditation on the intelligence of birds and on intelligence itself.PERFECT GIFT FOR BIRD LOVERS: As sales for THE GENIUS OF BIRDS prove, there is a passionate and enthusiastic audience for this type of book. Ackerman's investigations also demonstrate what bird lovers have always known, which is that birds are fantastically intelligence creatures.