- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The accled scientist's encounters with individual wild birds,
yielding “marvelous, mind-altering” (Los Angeles Times) ins
and discoveries
In his modern classics One Man’s Owl and Mind of the Raven,
Bernd Heinrich has written memorably about his relationships with
wild ravens and a great horned owl.
In One Wild Bird at a Time, Heinrich returns to his great love:
close, day-to-day observations of individual wild birds. There
are countless books on bird behavior, but Heinrich argues that
some of the most amazing bird behaviors fall below the radar of
what most birds do in aggregate. Heinrich’s “passionate
observations [that] superbly mix memoir and science” (New York
Times Book Review) lead to fascinating questions — and sometimes
startling discoveries. A great crested flycatcher, while bringing
food to the young in their nest, is attacked by the other
flycatcher nearby. Why? A pair of Northern flickers hammering
their nest-hole into the side of Heinrich’s cabin deliver the
rtunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings,
and to make a related discovery about nest-cleaning. One of a
clutch of redstart warbler babies fledges out of the nest from
twenty feet above the ground, and lands on the grass below. It
can’t fly. What will happen next?
Heinrich “looks closely, with his trademark ‘hands-and-knees
science’ at its most engaging, [delivering] what can only be
called psychological marvels of knowing” (Boston Globe).
An eminent biologist shares the joys of bird-watching and how
observing the anomalous behaviors of individual birds has guided
his research.
Heinrich (Emeritus, Biology/Univ. of Vermont; The Homing
Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration, 2014, etc.)
smoothly describes how studying the daily lives of birds in their
natural environments allows him to experience their world
vicariously. Now retired and living in a cabin in the Maine
woods, he devotes himself to closely observing “his avian
neighbors, visitors, and vagrants, and keep[ing] daily records
throughout spring, summer, fall, and winter.” Every year, he
welcomes a pair of broad-wing hawks who feast at a vernal pond
populated by frogs, spring peepers, and salamanders while
refurbishing their old nest. Unusually, they provide a fern cover
on the nest, which they update on a daily basis after their
chicks hatch. Heinrich also includes anecdotes from an earlier
time when he still lived in Vermont. Awakened one morning by the
loud drumming of a male woodpecker on a nearby apple tree, the
author wondered if perhaps he was seeking to attract a female.
Surprisingly, when a female was drawn to the sound, he stopped
drumming and flew away. The same behavior was repeated the
following day. The author’s observations led him to conclude that
the bird's drumming was not part of a mating ritual but rather a
noisy advertisement of his nest-building skills. Vireos nesting
near his cabin allowed him to observe how they deliberately
reduced the number of eggs they were hatching to accommodate the
reduced food supply after an unseasonal freeze. Heinrich explains
that bird-watching has been an important part of his life since
he was a boy on his family's farm. When he was 6, they moved from
Germany to Maine. Finding familiar birds nesting “immediately
made this place our home,” he writes.
An engaging memoir of the rtunities for doing scientific
research without leaving one's own backyard. (Kirkus)