The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live PDF
Preview The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live
BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Famine Business Future Cook The Food Connection Food Crops for the Future Global Ecology Last Animals at the Zoo The Engineer in the Garden: Genes and Genetics from the Idea of Heredity to the Creation of Life The Day Before Yesterday Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers The Variety of Life: A Survey and a Celebration of All the Creatures That Have Ever Lived In Mendel’s Footnotes: Genes and Genetics from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-second So Shall We Reap: The Concept of Enlightened Agriculture The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter Feeding People Is Easy The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor To My Grandchildren CONTENTS List of Illustrations PREFACE I A DIFFERENT WAY OF BEING 1. What It Means to Be a Flier 2. How Birds Became II DRAMATIS PERSONAE 3. Keeping Track: The Absolute Need to Classify 4. All the Birds in the World: An Annotated Cast List III HOW BIRDS LIVE THEIR LIVES 5. The Eating Machine 6. The World as an Oyster 7. Idyll and Mayhem: The Sex Lives of Birds 8. Families and Friends 9. The Mind of Birds IV BIRDS AND US 10. Living with Birds and Learning from Birds EPILOGUE: A MATTER OF ATTITUDE Further Reading and Notes Acknowledgments ILLUSTRATIONS Hen Harrier food pass One of the great sights of the Southern Ocean—diving-petrels Archaeopteryx Figure 1: The relationships of reptiles Figure 2: How the archosaurs gave rise to the birds Figure 3: How the birds are related to the rest of the dinosaurs Mononykus, at first sight, looks nothing like a bird. Hesperornis, from the Cretaceous, was the most maritime of all birds Birds, representing several different orders All the main ratities, living and dead Figure 4: How modern birds are related The most primitive of all the living anseriforms—Australia’s Magpie Goose Wood Ducks live only where woodpeckers make the holes in trees that they need to nest in. Coots are wonderfully aggressive. An adjutant stork Anhingas, alias “snakebirds,” are superb divers. The largest penguin ever was Platydyptes. Characteristically, Red-and-green Macaws fly arrow-straight ahead. The beak of the toucan is partly functional and partly for show. Figure 5: The relationships of perching birds: Passeriformes Shoebill catching a lungfish Avocets feed most efficiently in the company of other avocets. Arctic Skuas are broad-based hunters—and also efficient pirates. Australian farmers conducted major “Emu wars” against some vast flocks of the birds. Hummingbirds are the most specialized avian nectar feeders. Helmeted Guineafowl make their way in orderly fashion to the waterhole. Pigeons feed their young with cheesy “milk” that they secrete. Bar-headed Geese migrating over the Himalayas Hammerkop and nest Male Frigatebirds inflate their scarlet throat pouches to attract females. Many male gamebirds, like these Sage Grouse, display en masse to the females. Birds-of-paradise are often beautiful to the human eye but sometimes seem absurd. Albert’s Lyrebird shows its brilliance with a visual display and endlessly inventive mimicry. Mating dance of the Great Crested Grebe The Baya Weaver’s nest is among the great architectural achievements of all animals. The Greater Flamingo lays its eggs on towers of mud in a swamp. One individual stands sentinel in groups of Arabian Babblers, while the others enjoy feed nearby. Female hornbills wall themselves into the nest hole and must rely on the male to forage. Reed-warblers seem happy to lavish their care on the monstrous young of cuckoos. Cockatoo flying off with wool Animal instinct in action: baby Herring Gulls peck at a red spot on the mother’s beak. Greater Black-backed Gulls break the shells of armored animals by dropping them from a height. Cormorants stick to hunting underwater. Geniuses of the bird world: New Caledonian Crows not only use tools but also make them. Western Scrub-Jays “cache” food to use later—but if they notice other birds spying on them, they come back later and move it. Peregrines nesting high on a city building Dodos were depicted as amiable and rotund, but they may have been lean and mean. It’s impossible to predict which birds will take to life in cities: the Nacunda Nighthawks of Brazil Original illustrations by Jane Milloy. PREFACE AS A SMALL BOY IN SOUTH LONDON, JUST AFTER THE SECOND World War, I recognized only five kinds of birds. There were pigeons and sparrows, which were everywhere; the ducks and swans in the local parks; and a mixed category of “ordinary birds” that flew overhead from time to time and perched on roofs, for no particular reason except that they were birds and that’s what birds do. London Zoo soon broadened my horizons, with its Ostriches, Emus, and penguins, a statutory line-up of torpid owls like fluffy Russian dolls with revolving heads, and a huge array of parrots. (London Zoo had two of each species in those days—or sometimes only one of each.) There was also a mad-eyed creature in a tall Gothic cage labeled “Monkey-eating Eagle,” which opened its vast horny beak in a most suggestive fashion and frightened us all to death. Then my cousin Peter, out in Kent, conceived a passion for bird nesting—which boys were still encouraged to do in those days, along with the pinning of butterflies after a quick whiff of chloroform (“which may be had from your local chemist for a few pence”); and I began to perceive that “ordinary birds” included pipits and wagtails, terns and kestrels, Yellowhammers and robins, and a miscellany of crows, not all of which were black. I went at the age of five to a Church of England primary school. It was my first taste of religion—and a very kindly taste it was, too; the way that religion ought to be: songs and stories and being nice to people. The “nature table” was a shrine: a fir cone, a twig of willow with catkins, a mushroom, and a couple of unidentified rodent skulls from a local bomb site (there were three or four close by) of the kind that nowadays would bring in the disposal squad from Health and Safety, in jumpsuits and welders’ masks, to drop them with long tongs into polyethylene bags. But although we all caught measles and sneezles and whooping cough and mumps—“common childhood ailments,” as they were called—we did manage to avoid Weil’s disease and bubonic plague, although I imagine only by a whisker. There was also a glossy magazine, a huge departure in those austere times, with a picture of shorebirds
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