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In Owl, award-winning photographer Paul Bannick uses his intimate yet dramatic images to follow North American owls through the course of one year and in their distinct habitats. Readers follow along at the nest as each stage in an owl's life is chronicled: courtship, mating, and nesting in spring; fledging and feeding of young in summer; dispersal and gaining independence in fall; and, finally, winter's migrations and competitions for food. For owls, every day brings a new challenge to survive, and this book shows readers how owls use the unique res...
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What is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise? How do desert birds detect rain hundreds of kilometers away? How do birds navigate by using an innate magnetic compass? Tracing the history of how our knowledge about birds has grown, particularly through advances in technology over the past fifty years, Bird Sense tells captivating stories about how birds interact with one another and their environment.

Never before has there been a popular book about how intricately bird behavior is shaped by birds' senses. A lifetime spent studyi...
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In Discovering Birds, Paul Lawrence Farber rejects the view that eighteenth-century natural history disappeared with the rise of nineteenth-century biology. In this penetrating case study of the history of ornithology, Farber demonstrates interesting continuities: as natural history evolved into individual sciences (botany, geology, and zoology) and specialties (entomology and ichthyology), the study of birds emerged as a distinct scientific discipline that remained observational and taxonomic. Ornithologists continued to see one of their primary tasks as classification, and they fo...
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Birds are the most consistently inventive builders, and their nests set the bar for functional design in nature. Avian Architecture describes how birds design, engineer, and build their nests, deconstructing all types of nests found around the world using architectural blueprints and detailed descriptions of the construction processes and engineering techniques birds use. This spectacularly illustrated book features 300 full-color images and more than 35 case studies that profile key species worldwide. Each chapter covers a different type of nest, from tunnel nests and mound nests to...
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In the early nineteenth century 25 to 40 percent of North America's birds were passenger pigeons, traveling in flocks so massive as to block out the sun for hours or even days. The down beats of their wings would chill the air beneath and create a thundering roar that would drown out all other sound. Feeding flocks would appear as "a blue wave four or five feet high rolling toward you."

John James Audubon, impressed by their speed and agility, said a lone passenger pigeon streaking through the forest "passes like a thought." How prophetic-for although a billion pigeons crossed the ski...
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