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"Can birds smell?" "Is this the same cardinal that was at my feeder last year?" "Do robins 'hear' worms?" In "What It's Like to Be a Bird," David Sibley answers the most frequently asked questions about the birds we see most often. This special, large-format volume is geared as much to nonbirders as it is to the out-and-out obsessed, covering more than two hundred species and including more than 330 new illustrations by the author. While its focus is on familiar backyard birds--blue jays, nuthatches, chickadees--it also examines certain species that can be fairly easily observed, such as the seashore-dwelling Atlantic puffin. David Sibley's exacting artwork and wide-ranging expertise bring observed behaviors vividly to life. (For most species, the primary illustration is reproduced life-sized.) And while the text is aimed at adults--including fascinating new scientific research on the myriad ways birds have adapted to environmental changes--it is nontechnical, making it the perfect occasion for parents and grandparents to share their love of birds with young children, who will delight in the big, full-color illustrations of birds in action. Unlike any other book he has written, "What It's Like to Be a Bird" is poised to bring a whole new audience to David Sibley's world of birds." -- Amazon.com.… (more)
User reviews
I did not at all learn what it's like to be a bird. I read interviews with the author where he talked about how he has become convinced in the course of writing this book that birds have very sophisticated minds and make
Instead, it's a lovely coffee table book full of beautiful illustrations and trivia. The information in the book is fascinating, but it is presented as a literal bullet-list of facts about birds. The organization of the book is very strange: the introduction is a list of what facts are discussed in the book, arranged by topic. Then, the main part of the book is arranged by bird species. Each species gets a few pages of bulleted text. Sometimes the information under each species is specific to that bird, and sometimes it isn't, which makes it really frustrating to try to learn either about a specific bird or about a specific topic. Then the last section of the book is again a list of species, with a paragraph of information about each species.
The illustrations are beautiful. The facts are interesting, but basically random. This would be a lovely book to flip through to look at the pictures, or to pick up and read a few pages at a time, but it's very frustrating if your goal is to actually learn something coherent about birds.