Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird, by Tim Birkhead

This one was a disappointment. Totally got taken in by the cover and the subtitle. Doesn’t a book about life like a bird sound fascinating? Well, this wasn’t it. In essence, this was a book setting out to prove that birds have the same five senses as humans, plus a magnetic sense for navigation, and, potentially, emotions. Spoiler: they do; it’s been proven by lots of different tests (if you needed those to believe that birds do have multiple senses). So this book is really for a bird nerd, a zoology student, or someone interested in reading about how scientists go about confirming questions through tests.

Some general observations: 

1) Birds are weird, complex, and smelly. 

2) I think science is really trying to overthink why birds do a lot of what they do. Does everything that any living creature does have to be rooted in its will to survive? Does a creature even HAVE a will to survive, much less make a “positive genetic match” for future generations? You certainly can’t say that a bird makes a decision like that, then rule out their ability to reason or emote. 

3) I don’t feel bad at all about being a cat lady when I see bird people in action.

4) I think most animals have some sort of emotional range, but we project the same TYPES of fears and/or conclusions from fear upon them. For instance, do animals “rage” against death like we 21^st Century humans do? Or are they at peace with how the food chain functions? Perhaps that is why they may not show distress, even if they are in pain?