Sunday 6 August 2017

Review: The Magic and Mystery of Birds: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human

The Magic and Mystery of Birds: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human The Magic and Mystery of Birds: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human by Noah Strycker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Noah Strycker has been utterly besotted by birds for as long as he can remember. This passion has taken him to some of the remotest parts of the world, Antartica and the Falklands, to the Galápagos, one of the richest for all sorts of wildlife. His travels mean that he has seen a vast number of species from the ubiquitous pigeon that can travel vast distances to the same place each time, huge murmurations of starlings, magpies that can recognise themselves and bower birds that construct the most amazing structures to procreate. His studies and thoughts show that we have as many similarities as we do differences.

Strycker has drawn together a lot of interesting analogies and observations of our feathered friends. There is a lot of recent cutting-edge science in here too and subjects as varied as game theory and intelligence. He has made it easy to read as he peppers the text with lots of personal anecdotes and humorous stories about some of the mad things he has done in the name of research. Quite impressed by this and will definitely be reading his latest when it is out on breaking the record of spotting the most number of species in a year. 3.5 stars.


View all my reviews

2 comments:

  1. It's hard to go wrong with science and great anecdotes! Glad you fun reading this one :)

    ReplyDelete