Bird Brain

Bird Brain PDF Author: Nathan Emery
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165173
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"This book was conceived, designed and produced by Ivy Press"--Title page verso.

Bird Brain

Bird Brain PDF Author: Nathan Emery
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165173
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"This book was conceived, designed and produced by Ivy Press"--Title page verso.

Vision, Brain, and Behavior in Birds

Vision, Brain, and Behavior in Birds PDF Author: Harris Philip Zeigler
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262240369
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
This book provides the first comprehensive and current review of considerable progress made over the past decade in analyzing neural and behavioral mechanisms mediating visually guided behavior in birds.The visual capacities of birds rival even those of primates, and their visual system probably reflects the operation of a ground plan common to all vertebrates. This book provides the first comprehensive and current review of considerable progress made over the past decade in analyzing neural and behavioral mechanisms mediating visually guided behavior in birds.The book's five major sections deal with the visual world of birds, the organization of avian visual systems, the development and plasticity of visual structure and function, visuomotor control mechanisms, and cognitive processes. The introduction to each section discusses the nature and significance of the problem areas, providing a context for the chapters to follow, which review the current status of research on a specific problem. The contributors are an international assemblage of researchers, representing a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from ornithology to neurophysiology and including ethology, experimental psychology, anatomy, and developmental neurobiology. For the ethologist, avian behavior is the source of a wide variety of species-typical fixed action patterns; for the experimental psychologist, birds are the subject of choice for studies of conditioning, learning, and cognitive processes; for the neurobiologist they provide model systems for studying developmental processes, sensory mechanisms, orientation, and motor control. For these reasons, research on the avian brain and behavior occupies an increasingly important place in contemporary behavioral biology.

Bird Brains

Bird Brains PDF Author: Candace Savage
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
ISBN: 9780871569561
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Argues that the birds' powers of abstraction, memory, and creativity are equal to many mammals

The Genius of Birds

The Genius of Birds PDF Author: Jennifer Ackerman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399563121
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
“Lovely, celebratory. For all the belittling of ‘bird brains,’ [Ackerman] shows them to be uniquely impressive machines . . .” —New York Times Book Review “A lyrical testimony to the wonders of avian intelligence.” —Scientific American An award-winning science writer tours the globe to reveal what makes birds capable of such extraordinary feats of mental prowess Birds are astonishingly intelligent creatures. According to revolutionary new research, some birds rival primates and even humans in their remarkable forms of intelligence. In The Genius of Birds, acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman explores their newly discovered brilliance and how it came about. As she travels around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are shifting our view of what it means to be intelligent. At once personal yet scientific, richly informative and beautifully written, The Genius of Birds celebrates the triumphs of these surprising and fiercely intelligent creatures. Ackerman is also the author of Birds by the Shore: Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast.

Bird Brain

Bird Brain PDF Author: Chuck Mullin
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1783527862
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
When Chuck Mullin began to suffer from anxiety and depression aged seventeen, she turned to drawing comics as a way to make sense of her experience. She soon found that pigeons were the perfect subjects through which to explore the complexities of living with mental illness, and several years later, her funny, quirky birds have won legions of fans online. From Bad Times to Positivity, the comics in Bird Brain use humour to provide a glimpse of what’s going on in Chuck’s head: dissociative episodes; cycles of anxiety; her struggle to accept she’s not alone; and the power of optimism on the days it’s possible.

Avian Cognition

Avian Cognition PDF Author: Carel ten Cate
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107092388
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
An overview of current research and experimental approaches in avian cognition and how this relates to other species.

The Bird Way

The Bird Way PDF Author: Jennifer Ackerman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735223033
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think. “There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries –– What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species—ours—but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call—and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.

Bird Sense

Bird Sense PDF Author: Tim Birkhead
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 140883054X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
What is it like to be a swift, flying at over one hundred kilometres an hour? Or a kiwi, plodding flightlessly among the humid undergrowth in the pitch dark of a New Zealand night? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise?Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other. Our affinity for birds is often said to be the result of shared senses - vision and hearing - but how exactly do their senses compare with our own? And what about a birds' sense of taste, or smell, or touch or the ability to detect the earth's magnetic field? Or the extraordinary ability of desert birds to detect rain hundreds of kilometres away - how do they do it?Bird Sense is based on a conviction that we have consistently underestimated what goes on in a bird's head. Our understanding of bird behaviour is simultaneously informed and constrained by the way we watch and study them. By drawing attention to the way these frameworks both facilitate and inhibit discovery, it identifies ways we can escape from them to seek new horizons in bird behaviour.There has never been a popular book about the senses of birds. No one has previously looked at how birds interpret the world or the way the behaviour of birds is shaped by their senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of observation and an understanding of birds and their behaviour that is firmly grounded in science.

Bird Minds

Bird Minds PDF Author: Gisela Kaplan
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
ISBN: 1486300200
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In her comprehensive and carefully crafted book, Gisela Kaplan demonstrates how intelligent and emotional Australian birds can be. She describes complex behaviours such as grieving, deception, problem solving and the use of tools. Many Australian birds cooperate and defend each other, and exceptional ones go fishing by throwing breadcrumbs in the water, extract poisonous parts from prey and use tools to crack open eggshells and mussels. The author brings together evidence of many such cognitive abilities, suggesting plausible reasons for their appearance in Australian birds. Bird Minds is the first attempt to shine a critical and scientific light on the cognitive behaviour of Australian land birds. In this fascinating volume, the author also presents recent changes in our understanding of the avian brain and links these to life histories and longevity. Following on from Gisela’s well-received books on the Australian Magpie and the Tawny Frogmouth, as well as two earlier titles on birds, Bird Minds contends that the unique and often difficult conditions of Australia's environment have been crucial for the evolution of unusual complexities in avian cognition and behaviour.

Understanding Bird Behavior

Understanding Bird Behavior PDF Author: Wenfei Tong
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691211817
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A vivid, eye-opening view of why birds behave the way they do Birds are intelligent, sociable creatures that exhibit a wide array of behaviors—from mobbing and mimicking to mating and joint nesting. Why do they behave as they do? Bringing to light the remarkable actions of birds through examples from species around the world, Understanding Bird Behavior presents engaging vignettes about the private lives of birds, all explained in an evolutionary context. We discover how birds find food, relying on foraging techniques, tools, and thievery. We learn about the courtship rituals through which birds choose, compete for, woo, and win mates; the familial conflicts that crop up among parents, offspring, and siblings; and the stresses and strains of nesting, including territory defense, nepotism, and relationship sabotage. We see how birds respond to threats and danger—through such unique practices as murmurations, specific alarm calls, distraction displays, and antipredator nest design. We also read about how birds change certain behaviors—preening, migration, breeding, and huddling—based on climate. Richly illustrated, this book explores the increasing focus on how individual birds differ in personality and how big data and citizen scientists are helping to add to what we know about them. Drawing on classic examples and the latest research, Understanding Bird Behavior offers a close-up look at the many ways birds conduct themselves in the wild. Compelling insights into bird behavior Classic examples and the latest research, including work by citizen scientists Fascinating vignettes about the private lives of birds, from finding food and family life, to coping with climate and other threats 150 detailed color illustrations and photographs