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How Birds Evolve: What Science Reveals about Their Origin, Lives, and Diversity: A Book Review by a Non-Science Person

10,000 Birds

Doug Futuyma believes in science and in the scientific basis of evolution. How Birds Evolve: What Science Reveals about Their Origin, Lives, and Diversity by Douglas J. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a very different kind of book than popular books about bird behavior, which rely on story as much as science.

Science 221
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The Bird Way: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

For one thing, we become more aware of cultural biases in our science (new findings on warbling female birds, for example, reveal both gender and geographic biases). Many popular science books have neither. As Ackerman explains in her Introduction, studying extreme behavior brings new insight into what we think we know.

Research 230
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Rename All Birds Named After White People

10,000 Birds

John Porter McCown, who shot the first recorded specimen of this species known to Euro-American science, was a Confederate general, a high-ranking officer in the insurrection led by the southern plantocracy to preserve and expand Slavery and the mode of white supremacy which it supported. Well, no more!

Birds 260
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What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

Jennifer Ackerman points out in the introduction to What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds , that we don’t know much, but that very soon we may know a lot more. What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds is a joyous, fascinating read.

Owls 217
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National Audubon Society Birds of North America: A Guide Review

10,000 Birds

The photographs are from VIREO, the ornithological image collection associated with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, which licenses bird photographs to many guides and reference books. Using the icons to locate specific bird families takes a little getting used to, but if you do it often it works well as a finding tool.

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Bird Talk: An Exploration of Avian Communication–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

Bird communication is a complex and evolving science. Ballantine and Hyman explore how birds communicate and summarize studies on how that communication functions in diverse bird families all over the world. Bird communication is much broader than just vocalization, something I tend to forget. And, that’s it.

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Honey, I Shrunk The Dinosaurs!

10,000 Birds

There is a fantastic paper just out in Science : “Sustained miniaturization and anatomoical innovation in the dinosaurian anceestors of birds” by Michael Lee, Andrea Cau, Darren Naishe and Gareth Dyke. The paper that just came out in science has the following spectacular conclusion. The point is, of course, that whales are not cows.

Camels 201