• Complain

Colin Tudge - The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live

Here you can read online Colin Tudge - The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2009, publisher: Crown, genre: Romance novel. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Crown
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2009
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

How are birds so good at flying and navigating?
Why are birds so like mammals and yet so very different?
Did birds descend from dinosaurs, and if so, does that mean birds are dinosaurs?
How do they court each other and fend off rivals?
What s being communicated in birdsong?
Can we ever know how birds think?
In this fascinating exploration of the avian class, Colin Tudge considers the creatures of the air. From their evolutionary roots to their flying, feeding, fighting, mating, nesting, and communicating, Tudge provocatively ponders what birds actually doas well as why they do it and how. With the same curiosity, passion, and insight he brought to redwoods, pines, and palm trees in his widely acclaimed book The Tree, Tudge here studies sparrows, parrots, and even the Monkey-eating Eagle to better understand their worldand our own.
There is far more to a birds existence than gliding gracefully on air currents or chirping sweetly from fence poststhe stakes are life and death. By observing and explaining the complex strategy that comes into play with everything from migration to social interaction to the timing of giving birth to young, Tudge reveals how birds are uniquely equipped biologically to succeed and survive. And he offers an impassioned plea for humans to learn to coexist with birds without continuing to endanger their survival.
Complete with an annotated cast list of all the known birds in the world plus gorgeous illustrationsThe Bird is a comprehensive and delightfully accessible guide for everyone from dedicated birders to casual birdwatchers that celebrates and illuminates the remarkable lives of birds.

Colin Tudge: author's other books


Who wrote The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Famine Business Future Cook The Food Connection - photo 1

BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Famine Business Future Cook The Food Connection - photo 2

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Famine Business

Future Cook

The Food Connection

Food Crops for the Future

Global Ecology

Last Animals at the Zoo

The Engineer in the Garden: Genes and Genetics from the Idea of Heredity to the Creation of Life

The Day Before Yesterday

Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers

The Variety of Life: A Survey and a Celebration of All the Creatures That Have Ever Lived

In Mendels Footnotes: Genes and Genetics from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-second

So Shall We Reap: The Concept of Enlightened Agriculture

The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter

Feeding People Is Easy

The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor

To My Grandchildren C ONTENTS I II III IV I LLUSTRATIONS Hen Harrier food - photo 3

To My Grandchildren

C ONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

I LLUSTRATIONS

Hen Harrier food pass

One of the great sights of the Southern Oceandiving-petrels

Archaeopteryx

: The relationships of reptiles

: How the archosaurs gave rise to the birds

: How the birds are related to the rest of the dinosaurs

Mononykus, at first sight, looks nothing like a bird.

Hesperornis, from the Cretaceous, was the most maritime of all birds

Birds, representing several different orders

All the main ratities, living and dead

: How modern birds are related

The most primitive of all the living anseriformsAustralias Magpie Goose

Wood Ducks live only where woodpeckers make the holes in trees that they need to nest in.

Coots are wonderfully aggressive.

An adjutant stork

Anhingas, alias snakebirds, are superb divers.

The largest penguin ever was Platydyptes.

Characteristically, Red-and-green Macaws fly arrow-straight ahead.

The beak of the toucan is partly functional and partly for show.

: The relationships of perching birds: Passeriformes

Shoebill catching a lungfish

Avocets feed most efficiently in the company of other avocets.

Arctic Skuas are broad-based huntersand also efficient pirates.

Australian farmers conducted major Emu wars against some vast flocks of the birds.

Hummingbirds are the most specialized avian nectar feeders.

Helmeted Guineafowl make their way in orderly fashion to the waterhole.

Pigeons feed their young with cheesy milk that they secrete.

Bar-headed Geese migrating over the Himalayas

Hammerkop and nest

Male Frigatebirds inflate their scarlet throat pouches to attract females.

Many male gamebirds, like these Sage Grouse, display en masse to the females.

Birds-of-paradise are often beautiful to the human eye but sometimes seem absurd.

Alberts Lyrebird shows its brilliance with a visual display and endlessly inventive mimicry.

Mating dance of the Great Crested Grebe

The Baya Weavers nest is among the great architectural achievements of all animals.

The Greater Flamingo lays its eggs on towers of mud in a swamp.

One individual stands sentinel in groups of Arabian Babblers, while the others enjoy feed nearby.

Female hornbills wall themselves into the nest hole and must rely on the male to forage.

Reed-warblers seem happy to lavish their care on the monstrous young of cuckoos.

Cockatoo flying off with wool

Animal instinct in action: baby Herring Gulls peck at a red spot on the mothers beak.

Greater Black-backed Gulls break the shells of armored animals by dropping them from a height. Cormorants stick to hunting underwater.

Geniuses of the bird world: New Caledonian Crows not only use tools but also make them.

Western Scrub-Jays cache food to use laterbut if they notice other birds spying on them, they come back later and move it.

Peregrines nesting high on a city building

Dodos were depicted as amiable and rotund, but they may have been lean and mean.

Its impossible to predict which birds will take to life in cities: the Nacunda Nighthawks of Brazil

Original illustrations by Jane Milloy.

P REFACE

A S A SMALL BOY IN S OUTH L ONDON, JUST AFTER THE S ECOND World War, I recognized only five kinds of birds. There were pigeons and sparrows, which were everywhere; the ducks and swans in the local parks; and a mixed category of ordinary birds that flew overhead from time to time and perched on roofs, for no particular reason except that they were birds and thats what birds do. London Zoo soon broadened my horizons, with its Ostriches, Emus, and penguins, a statutory line-up of torpid owls like fluffy Russian dolls with revolving heads, and a huge array of parrots. (London Zoo had two of each species in those daysor sometimes only one of each.) There was also a mad-eyed creature in a tall Gothic cage labeled Monkey-eating Eagle, which opened its vast horny beak in a most suggestive fashion and frightened us all to death. Then my cousin Peter, out in Kent, conceived a passion for bird nestingwhich boys were still encouraged to do in those days, along with the pinning of butterflies after a quick whiff of chloroform (which may be had from your local chemist for a few pence); and I began to perceive that ordinary birds included pipits and wagtails, terns and kestrels, Yellowhammers and robins, and a miscellany of crows, not all of which were black.

I went at the age of five to a Church of England primary school. It was my first taste of religionand a very kindly taste it was, too; the way that religion ought to be: songs and stories and being nice to people. The nature table was a shrine: a fir cone, a twig of willow with catkins, a mushroom, and a couple of unidentified rodent skulls from a local bomb site (there were three or four close by) of the kind that nowadays would bring in the disposal squad from Health and Safety, in jumpsuits and welders masks, to drop them with long tongs into polyethylene bags. But although we all caught measles and sneezles and whooping cough and mumpscommon childhood ailments, as they were calledwe did manage to avoid Weils disease and bubonic plague, although I imagine only by a whisker. There was also a glossy magazine, a huge departure in those austere times, with a picture of shorebirds mysteriously labelled Oystercatchers and Knots.

I was hooked. It isnt formal teaching that gets you into things, or at least not necessarily. Its the incidentals. I took it to be self-evident from about the age of six that everyone must be obsessed with nature, and I am still shocked to find how far and how often that is from the case.

The problem, once you are hooked, is how to get close to living creatures, how to engage with them. One way is simply to learn: I was lucky to go to a school where biology was taught brilliantly, and then to an ancient and therefore damp and crumbling university packed with Nobel Prize-winning biologists. I never wanted to be a professional scientist myself. I just liked, and like, being with the creatures themselves, and the ideas, and matching words to the ideas. So I write books about them.

The last such book was on treesmy other life-long indulgencebut as it progressed my friend Barrie Lees said, I already know about trees, as indeed he does. What I really want to know about is birds. They keep coming into the garden. They fiddle about. What are they? What are they up to? Why are they doing whatever they do?

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live»

Look at similar books to The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.