Sounds of the Wild: Birds

Sounds of the Wild: Birds Review

Are you ready to soar? Young readers can let their imaginations take flight in Sounds of the Wild: Birds, the extraordinary new title from acclaimed illustrator Maurice Pledger. Five dazzling 3-D pop-up panoramas are enhanced with real bird sounds, bringing the wondrous world of birds to life. With colorful, detailed artwork and informative text, this book takes readers on a journey across the globe — from lush wetlands and tropical forests to remote deserts and mountains — to discover all types of birds big and small.

Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird Review

Most people would love to be able to fly like a bird, but few of us are aware of the other sensations that make being a bird a gloriously unique experience. What is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise? How do desert birds detect rain hundreds of kilometers away? How do birds navigate by using an innate magnetic compass?

Tracing the history of how our knowledge about birds has grown, particularly through advances in technology over the past fifty years, Bird Sense tells captivating stories about how birds interact with one another and their environment. More advanced testing methods have debunked previously held beliefs, such as female starlings selecting mates based on how symmetrical the male’s plumage markings are. (Whereas females can discern the difference between symmetrical and asymmetrical markings, they are not very good at detecting small differences among symmetrically marked males!)

Never before has there been a popular book about how intricately bird behavior is shaped by birds’ senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of fieldwork experiences, insights, and a unique understanding of birds, all firmly grounded in science. No one who reads Bird Sense can fail to be dazzled by it.

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives Review

Part coming-of-age autobiography and part nature guide, Gerald Durrell’s dazzling sequel to My Family and Other Animals is based on his boyhood on Corfu, from 1933 to 1939. Originally published in 1969 but long out of print, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives is filled with charming observations, amusing anecdotes, boyhood memories, and childlike wonder.

Everything Bird: What Kids Really Want to Know about Birds (Kids Faqs)

Everything Bird: What Kids Really Want to Know about Birds (Kids Faqs) Review

Everything Bird is the newest addition to our popular Kids' FAQs series. The question and answer format packed with photos and kid-appealing layout has made this series stand out from the pack. In addition to providing basic information like habitat, diet, life cycle and history, these books delve into the more unusual questions like Why are vultures so ugly? Perfect for the budding birdwatcher or simply curious kids, this book includes 29 questions from kids with answers including information on more than 60 different types of birds. Includes information on how to get more birds to your yard, but also cautions against interfering with birds in the wild.

The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany

The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany Review

In this stunning assemblage of words and images, novelist and avid birdwatcher Graeme Gibson has crafted an extraordinary tribute to the venerable relationship between humans and birds.

Birds have ever been the symbols of our highest aspirations. As divine messengers, symbols of our yearning for the heavens, or avatars of glorious song and colour, they have stirred our imaginations from the moment we first looked into the sky. Whether as the Christian dove, or Quetzalcoatl—the Aztec Plumed Serpent—or in Plato’s vision of the human soul growing wings and feathers, religion and philosophy have looked to birds as representatives of our better selves—that part of us not bound to the earth.

With the passion of a birdwatcher and hoarder of words, Gibson has spent fifteen years collecting the literary and artistic forms our affinity for birds has taken over the centuries. Birds appear again and again in mythology and folk tales, and in literature by writers as diverse as Ovid, Thomas Hardy, Kafka, Thoreau and T.S. Eliot. They’ve been omens, allegories, disguises and guides; they’ve been worshipped, eaten, feared and loved. Nor does Gibson forget the fascination they hold for science, as the Galapagos finches did for Darwin. Birds figure charmingly and tellingly in the work of such nature writers as Gilbert White, Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat and Barry Lopez.

Gorgeously illustrated, woven from centuries of human response to the delights of the feathered tribes, The BedsideBook of Birds is for anyone who is aware of birds, and for everyone who is intrigued by the artistic forms that humanity has created to represent its soul.

From The Bedside Book of Birds ~

Stevenson remembered the story of a monk who had been distracted from his copy-work by the song of a bird. He went into the garden to listen more closely, and when he returned, after what he thought were only a few minutes, he discovered that a century had gone by, that his fellow monks were dead and his ink had turned to dust. The song of the bird had given him a taste of Paradise, where an instant is as a hundred years of earthly time. Was the same true of time in hell, Stevenson asked himself.

Alberto Manguel

Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems

Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems Review

A rich, delicious treasury of nature poems from around the world—from the pastoral beauty of ancient times to the modern era’s destruction of living things.

The year 2011 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of New Directions, and what better way to celebrate than to dive into the diversity of its poets reveling in the wonders and joys of nature. Arranged chronologically by each poet’s birth, Birds, Beasts, and Seas showcases the work of over one hundred and twenty poets from the U.S. and abroad, culled from the New Directions library. Beginning with ancient Chinese, Greek, Roman, Inuit, Japanese, Indian, and Persian poets, then dipping into the Troubadours and the Renaissance, the collection gradually blossoms into a constellation of poets from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into our present. Sappho, Neruda, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Lorca mix with Anne Carson, Inger Christensen, Coral Bracho, and Gu Cheng. Poems cross cultures, link, and converse in paeans to nature and its elegies; in nature’s dangers, mutabilities, and sanctuary; in its myths and scientific revelations. Also highlighted are translations by such luminaries as Samuel Beckett, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lowell. Hidden jewels of nature await your discovery.

Guide for Angry Birds: Tips and Tricks

Guide for Angry Birds: Tips and Tricks Review

This Angry Birds Guide show you how to master the game and surpass your high scores!

The report has everything you ever wanted to know about Angry Birds!