The life, death and afterlife of one of the true icons of extinction, the Great AukThe great auk was a flightless, goose-sized bird superbly adapted for life at sea. Fat, flush with feathers and easy to capture, the birds were in trouble whenever sailors visited their once-remote breeding colonies. Places like Funk Island, off north-east Newfoundland, became scenes of unimaginable slaughter, with birds killed in their millions. By 1800 the auks of Funk Island were ...

'I think that, if required on pain of death to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird's egg'Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1862How are eggs of different shapes made, and why are they the shape they are? When does the shell of an egg harden? Why do some eggs contain two yolks? How are the colours and patterns of an eggshell created, and why do they vary? And which end of an egg is laid first – the blunt end or the pointy end?

Award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on an epic and dazzling journey through this mutual history with birds.Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art and philosophy, from the ibises mummified by Ancient Egyptians and Renaissance experiments on the woodpecker to the Victorian obsessions with egg collecting and our present fight to save endangered species....

Hoe zou het zijn om een zwaluw te zijn en met honderd kilometer per uur door de lucht te vliegen? Of een flamingo die de regen kan waarnemen die kilometers verderop valt? En wat voelt een jan-van-gent die na de lange winter zijn partner terugziet? De zintuigen van vogels geeft antwoord op deze en vele andere vragen, simpelweg door de zintuigen te beschrijven die vogels gebruiken om hun omgeving te interpreteren. Zijn de zintuigen van vogels te vergelijken met die van mensen? 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 i...

Waarom hebben eieren de vorm die ze hebben? Waarom zitten in sommige eieren twee dooiers? Hoe worden de kleuren en patronen van een eierschaal gevormd? En welke kant van een ei komt als eerste naar buiten de platte kant of het puntige gedeelte? In Het vogelei staat de reis vanaf de vorming en de bevruchting tot het uiteindelijke uitkomen van het ei centraal. Veelgeprezen ornitholoog Tim Birkhead begint bij de prachtige eieren van de zeekoet, die elk volkomen van elkaar verschillen in patro...

Pourquoi les flamants roses ne se perdent-ils jamais au cours de leur migration ? Comment un merle repère-t-il un ver caché dans la terre ? Comment un guillemot adulte reconnaît-il son petit au milieu de la cacophonie des milliers d’individus de la colonie ? Contrairement à bien des idées reçues, les oiseaux bénéficient d’une large palette de perceptions sensorielles : ils disposent non seulement de sens qui nous sont familiers – la vue, l’ouïe, l’odorat, le toucher, le goût – mais aussi d...

"Los sentidos de las aves" se basa en la convicción de que siempre hemos subestimado lo que sucede en la cabeza de un pájaro.Nuestra comprensión del comportamiento de las aves está simultáneamente atravesada y restringida por la forma en que los observamos y estudiamos. Al llamar la atención sobre la forma en que estos marcos facilitan y a la vez inhiben el descubrimiento, identifica formas de escapar de ellos para buscar nuevos horizontes en el comportamiento de las aves.T...

The creation of Dolly the sheep in the 1990s was for many people the start of a new era: the age of genetically modified animals. However, the idea was not new for in the 1920s an amateur scientist, Hans Duncker, decided to genetically engineer a red canary. Though his experiments failed, they paved the way for others to succeed when it was recognised that the canary needed to be both a product of nature and nurture. This highly original narrative, of huge contemporary relevance, reveals h...

Brought to you by Penguin.Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art and philosophy.Looking to the skies above, we have variously worshipped them as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves in their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight and, more recently, attempted to protect them.In Birds and Us, award-winning wri...

The story of the author's research expeditions in the Canadian Arctic, this book is for professional and amateur ornithologists, students in ecology and animal behaviour.The Arctic is one of the world's last great wildernesses: a place of outstanding beauty, history and extraordinary wildlife in which seabirds form an important component of a rich, marine environment. Like many other remote regions, it is under threat from human activities, but to protect it we nee...

'Birkhead has combined ingenuity and perseverance to produce an evocative portrait of a great pioneer in the scientific study of birds' Literary ReviewFrancis Willughby lived and thrived in the midst of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Along with his Cambridge tutor John Ray, Willughby was determined to overhaul the whole of natural history and impose order on its complexity. It was exhilarating, exacting and exhausting work. Yet befor...