Review by New York Times Review
AVIAN MIGRATION IS such a vast and complex phenomenon that it can accommodate star treatment in two new books. "The Thing With Feathers," by Noah Strycker, takes on the miracle of navigation as part of a sweeping look at bird behavior. For Bernd Heinrich, in "The Homing Instinct," the biannual odyssey of billions of birds is the heart of the matter. Both authors veer from dense scientific canvassing to rich, more personal storytelling. They also share an interest in the odd quirks of avian life. For instance, despite the putrid menu vultures favor, their excrement is sterile. In fact, letting the waste run down their legs can clean off germs from the gore; it's their version of freshening up with a moist towelette after a barbecue. Tiny bee hummingbirds are so small you could mail 16 of them for the price of a single stamp. Robins can navigate with the right eye alone, but not the left. Albatrosses, who spend 95 percent of their lives over open ocean, are thought to be able to shut down half their brains while continuing to fly at 40 m.p.h. For blackcap warblers, the direction of migration is clearly innate, so crossbreeding a group of blackcaps who flew south for fall migration with a group that oriented westward resulted in offspring who flew in a southwesterly direction. And if bird breakups are seen in human terms, flamingos' behavior - their divorce rate is 99 percent - fits their flashy profile. Albatrosses, by contrast, really do hang in there for the long haul, staying together till death. But both books have much more on their minds. Intelligence, altruism, self-awareness, love and the meaning of home (to birds and to us) are the greater concerns that occupy these writers. For Strycker, a discovery in 2008 by German researchers is revelatory: Mirror recognition, found in little more than a handful of big-brained mammals, shows up in only one bird species, the Eurasian magpie. Magpies are members of the corvid family along with crows and ravens, a group considered even more intelligent than parrots. Social and smart, corvids have impressed researchers with their ability to recognize human faces and use tools. Through them, Strycker ponders consciousness, that "intuitive but slippery word that defies scientific definition," as he thoughtfully stitches together notions of self-awareness and empathy, and of brain structure differences in mammals and birds. Considering that magpies have even been observed holding "funerals" for fallen comrades, laying grass by the body and then standing vigil, Strycker asks, "Is it going too far to suggest that they show behavior analogous to human emotions?" Comparisons in these books go both ways. While humans tend to get lost easily, Heinrich points out in "The Homing Instinct," birds do not. They are equipped with any number of systems or senses or talents for navigation that we fail to understand completely, and possibly others we are not yet aware of. Migrating birds are moved, in the fall, by the imperative to travel daunting distances to feeding grounds, and in the spring to return to nesting/mating areas close to where they were born. For Arctic terns, that means flying from pole to pole for an annual round trip of perhaps 44,000 miles. Many birds end these odysseys on ragged wings; their bodies half their starting weight and their muscles and organs shriveled. How do they do it? We know that they rely on various methods to find their way. Among them, it can be coded in their genes, or a route learned from parents; they use visual landmarks and orient by the sun, or by stars; they sense magnetic fields and infrasound, pick up on scent and take cues from polarized light. In an effort to single out which approaches individual species use and how they do it, and considering that, as Heinrich points out, birds don't migrate in a lab, researchers have had to come up with some inventive experiments. Captive birds do orient their movements in a certain direction during migration season. So several investigators have tested theories of star navigation by placing their subjects inside planetariums. BOTH AUTHORS ARE most readable when describing their own fieldwork and personal experiences. For Strycker that's his chapters on penguins and albatrosses. He explains in wonderful stories that penguins are afraid of the dark (leopard seals wait in black waters to gobble them up) and that albatrosses truly love one another (mating for life and using each other's breasts as pillows). Young albatrosses come hard-wired for the courtship dance, but they get better with time. They mirror the dance of partners and refine their moves, sometimes over years as they narrow down their choice of mate. "By that time," Strycker writes, "it has spent so much time dancing with that specific bird . . . that the pair's sequence of moves is as unique as a lover's fingerprint." Heinrich, meanwhile, widens his scope beyond birds and will make you fall in love with Charlotte, the orb web spider in his home whom he named after E.B. White's heroine, and to whom he served freshly caught flies and bumblebees. He is also a master at digging up charming anecdotes from natural history. He quotes a 1949 pamphlet for honey hunters on how to track a bee back to the hive: "One's first task is to catch a bee and paint its tail blue," it says, suggesting caution since "bees do not like to be painted." Both authors ask what bird studies "reveal about being human," as Strycker's subtitle has it, but the question can seem forced. Strycker tells us that speedy hummingbirds, eating on the run and flitting from mate to mate, are prone to heart attacks. Considering our accelerating society, he asks, "Do we really want to become hummingbirds?" Heinrich's approach to the human connection is more subtle. He writes that animals "open a window with a broad view onto our unending quest into the mysterious minds of animals, and in the process they illuminate our own." His philosophical and sometimes nostalgic look at what home has meant to him is interwoven throughout his animal stories. Whether the links are tenuous or tight, the authors agree that, as Strycker writes, "By studying birds, we ultimately learn about ourselves." And the good news is that the lessons come to us: "Birds are everywhere. All we have to do is watch." Birds orient by the sun, or by stars; they sense magnetic fields and pick up on scent. VICKI CONSTANTINE CROKE covers our connection to all creatures for public radio at thewildlife.wbur.org. Her book "Elephant Company" was just published.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 3, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Birds are fascinating, and the more we humans study them, the more similarities we find between ourselves and our feathered neighbors. Strycker, editor of Birding magazine and author (Among Penguins, 2011), here combines the latest in ornithological science with snippets of history and his own vast experience in the field to hatch a thoroughly entertaining examination of bird behavior. Some avian behaviors don't apply to humans the almost magical homing abilities of pigeons, the incredible sense of smell of turkey vultures (as tested by the teenage author with the cooperation of a very dead deer and his extremely tolerant parents) but many seemingly incredible bird actions have parallels in our own lives. Fairy wrens are cooperative breeders and show us one reason humans so often collaborate. The famous pecking order seen in domestic chickens certainly is evident in office politics, and magpies have often been seen holding impromptu funerals for their deceased flock mates. A sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball dances in synchrony to his favorite Backstreet Boys CD, leading to a discussion of the role of music for both birds and humans. Birds are equally alien and familiar, and in Strycker's absorbing survey, we find out how much fun it is simply to watch them.--Bent, Nancy Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Strycker (Among Penguins), associate editor of Birding magazine, gets in his element, writing about his experiences watching penguins in Antarctica, putting out a deer carcass to assess the olfactory capabilities of turkey vultures, and monitoring the nests of purple-crowned fairy-wrens in the Australian outback. His work is a joy to read when he focuses on the interesting behavior of the birds with which he is obviously enamored, such as the astounding homing skills of pigeons, the uncanny talent of thousands of starlings to dart through the sky collectively without crashing into one another, or the ability of male bowerbirds to use sticks and brightly colored objects to assemble decorative structures that look like works of art. His prose is difficult to stop reading. However, when Strycker attempts to draw lessons, as his subtitle implies, about what it means to be human, he is far less successful. In discussing the evolution of music, ties between humans and birds are only loosely limned. Similarly, when he talks about evolutionary theory, from altruism to mating strategies, he presents little that is new or engaging. This will likely be a fascinating book for those captivated by birds but of only marginal interest to those looking for evolutionary insights into human behavior. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Here is good reading on a dazzling variety of avian subjects, including connections between birds and humans. Birder and bird photographer Strycker (Among Penguins) divides his book into three sections: "Body," "Mind," and "Spirit." In the first section, he explores the homing abilities of pigeons, the flocking abilities of starlings, vultures' sense of smell, unusual irruptive flights of owls, and the pugnaciousness of hummingbirds. The "Mind" section features coverage of parrots' attraction to music, food hoarding in species of crows, and penguins' particular fears. "Spirit" examines bowerbird courtship, intergenerational cooperative behavior in some bird species, and the apparent love among -albatrosses. Strycker writes engagingly and with extensive documentation; his notes and sources contain veritable minichapters of additional information. VERDICT Now that anthropomorphic approaches to studying animals are gaining respectability, Strycker's book is all the more relevant. A fine choice for birders and readers in natural history. With minimal illustration.-Henry T. Armistead, formerly with Free Lib. of Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Birding associate editor Strycker (Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica, 2011) backs up his claim that "[b]ird behavior offers a mirror in which we can reflect on human behavior." The author pinpoints experiments beginning in the 1970s that examined the amazing memory of nutcrackers, which were able to survive cold winters at high elevations by stashing pine seeds in the ground. Surpassing the memory skills of most humans, "[i]n one fall season, a single nutcracker may store tens of thousands of pine seeds in as many as 5,000 different mini-caches, which he will retrieve in winter." Strycker writes about how bird fanciers puzzled over this feat, since the birds left no obvious signs of how they did it. By a process of elimination, an ornithologist designed an experiment that demonstrated how the nutcrackers oriented to landmarks in the environment to build three-dimensional mental maps. Even more intriguing are magpies, which join the select company of humans and great apes, elephants, dolphins and orcas in recognizing their own images in mirrors. Seemingly, this is an indication of self-awareness and a capacity for qualities such as empathy. What, then, asks the author, can we say about pet dogs, which fail to self-recognize in mirrors yet do demonstrate empathy? Referencing the behavior of Antarctic penguins, which only jump into the ocean in groups to avoid the seals that feed on them but are calm in the presence of humans, Strycker weighs in on the nurture/nature debate and concludes that, for us and penguins, "emotion itself is innate, fear of particular things is regulated by experience." The author speculates that the behavior of fairy-wrens, a species that sometimes assists feeding nonrelated birds, serves as an expression of altruism in nature, and he attributes the abilities of homing pigeons to the intelligent use of sensory clues. A delightful book with broad appeal.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
