Month: December 2023

Exactly what the subtitle says. Lots of great photographs, details on how the featured bird species select a mate, build their nests, share parenting duties, feed the young, their development and how long it takes them to fledge, then become independent, etc. A bit on social structure, song types, migration patterns and other details as well. Most of the species in here are songbirds, but there’s also great blue herons, red-tailed hawks, pigeons, killdeer, herring gulls, mallards and great horned owls. I was delighted to come across a bunch of new facts.

Such as: robins in my area don’t really migrate. You think they’re gone all winter, but they’re just in scattered flocks traveling around to different food sources. They get noticed when the males start staking out individual territories on lawns in the spring again. Mourning doves build a nest so loosely woven that sometimes eggs fall out through the bottom of it! When you find a nest with eggs and no parent bird in sight, it’s probably not deserted. Many female birds don’t start incubating until all the eggs are laid- then they will hatch at the same time. Hummingbirds use spider silk in their nest construction, so it will stretch as the baby birds grow. Young hairy woodpeckers stack their heads on top of each other’s necks in the nest, and the one on top gets fed when the parent arrives. Then it moves its head down to the bottom, the next on top gets fed, and so on- so they all receive an equal amount of food (most hatchlings, the biggest beggar gets the most food and smaller ones fall behind in growth). Phoebes feed their older nestlings wasps and bees, which they first beat on branches to subdue (and possibly break off the stinger). Chickadees have a social hierarchy in their winter flocks, and pair up with mates that have the same position among the opposite gender. Nuthatches smear pine resin around the entrance to their nest, and sometimes smashed-up stinkbugs, too- apparently to deter predators. Mockingbirds never reuse a nest, they always build a new one. Eagles are known to build on the old nest year after year until it gets huge. And peregrine falcons habitually use the same ledges, generation after generation. One nest site in Australia had a heap of debris (excrement and food scraps) below the ledge with material at the bottom estimated to be 16,000 years old. Female chipping sparrows tend to nest in the same small area every year, but they don’t reuse the nest. Instead they might tear it apart and use the materials to build a new one.

And that’s just a small sample. I found it all very engaging to read about. Plus the pictures were just stellar.

Similar reads: Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into the Nest by Julie Zickefoose, The Mating Lives of Birds by James Parry, What It’s Like to Be a Bird by David Sibley.

Borrowed from the public library.

This book caught my eye several times on the library shelf (spanning months), finally I caved and brought it home. Delightful. It showcases a wide array of strange, unusual and rare animals- from quirky and frightening (deep sea creatures!) to just plain silly-looking (as noted by the author, ha). The text has snippets of information- where the animals live, how much or little (sometimes almost nothing) is known about them, what adaptations their odd appearances evolved for. Sometimes also unknown. Most stunning are the two-page illustrations of every specimen- meticulous in detail (and not just in the animals’ fur or shining eyes or textured skin, also the lichens and tree bark and whatever they’re posed on- so very lifelike)! I didn’t learn a whole lot about the animals that were new to me, except to realize now that hey, that creature exists in the world- but still I was wowed. Most fun is that the book features one animal that’s purely fictional. I guessed, and then handed the volume to my kid to look through and guess- we were both wrong! It wasn’t until later when I thumbed through the book a second time, enjoying the images all over again and typing into the computer every single one I didn’t know was real, that I figured it out. I knew of the tree kangaroo, the kakapo, tomato frog and morymid, the aye-aye and platypus and many birds-of-paradise, from reading or seeing pictures and documentaries about them before. But there were just as many I’d never heard of, much less seen pictures- and some of these are so rare, the internet doesn’t even have images, just a few bare descriptions or the same paintings from this book! I won’t tell you those names however, just in case you want to solve the puzzle for yourself.

Another curious thing is that this book has an interesting, variable format. Some of the pictures are very tall, and printed across the spread so the top of the image is the left of the lefhand page, bottom of the image is right of the righthand. Text flipped to read that way too, if you turn the whole book ninety degrees clockwise, you read it all down. Never saw that before!

Borrowed from the public library.