Birds and Us: A 12,000 Year History, from Cave Art to Conservation

Birds and Us

Tim Birkhead

VIKING

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The Red Canary : The Story of the First Genetically Engineered Animal

At the turn of the 20th century canary mania spread from the US and South Africa to Europe, with 150,000 males being raised each year to satisfy demand. Hans Duncker, a German bird enthusiast, was fascinated by the fact that in the 1870s English canary breeders had caused a scandal by feeding their Norwich canaries with red peppers to turn them orange. Duncker spent the rest of his life (1881-1961) using breeding rather than feeding to try and produce a red canary. Duncker's ultimately unsuccessful work was picked up by an Englishman, Anthony Gill, and an American, Charles Bennett, in the 1930s. This was all long before genetically modified organisms and Dolly the sheep, but this amazing story (with its backdrop of the rise of Nazism and eugenic policies) has huge contemporary relevance. This is a highly original narrative revealing how an amateur obsession heralded the inherent dangers of genetic manipulation.

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

For thousands of years people have been fascinated by birds, and today that fascination is still growing. In 2007 bird-watching is one of the most popular pastimes, not just in Britain, but throughout the world, and the range of interest runs from the specialist to the beginner. In The Wisdom of Birds, Birkhead takes the reader on a journey that not only tells us about the extraordinary lives of birds - from conception and egg, through territory and song, to migration and fully fledged breeder - but also shows how, over centuries, we have overcome superstition and untested 'truths' to know what we know, and how recent some of that knowledge is. It was only in the nineteenth century that the ancient belief that swallows hibernated under water (!) finally gave way to general acceptance of the facts of migration. In the same century of dazzling experimental science, even Darwin chose not to dwell on the sexual promiscuity of female birds to spare the blushes of his daughter, who was helping to correct the proofs of The Descent of Man. Conceived for a general audience, and illustrated throughout with more than 100 exquisitely beautiful illustrations, many of them rarely, if ever, seen before, The Wisdom of Birds is a book full of stories, knowledge and unexpected revelations.

The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology

History

Bloomsbury UK

In 1921, forty-year-old schoolteacher Hans Duncker set off through the streets of Bremen. Near the cathedral, he heard a nightingale singing - but this was August and no one had ever heard a nightingale sing in the middle of the town at this time of year. In fact, the bird he heard was extraordinary - it was a special canary (a nightingale-canary) that Karl Reichs, a bird keeper, had engineered through a decade of dedicated breeding. With Reich's knowledge of birds and Duncker's expertise in genetics, the two joined forces and devised the audacious plan to create a brand new bird - a red canary. Favoured originally for their voices, canaries were once so rare that they were worth more than their weight in gold and had been exported in their millions. With Duncker and Reich's research, the canary once more took centre stage - this time in the race to create a genetically engineered animal. But it wasn't until an Englishman and an American recognised that the red canary would need to be a product of both nature AND nurture that the project was finally brought to fruition.

Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )

<p>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.</p>

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

Bloomsbury Publishing

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg

'I think that, if required on pain of death to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird's egg' Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1862 How are eggs of different shapes made, and why are they the shape they are? When does the shell of an egg harden? Why do some eggs contain two yolks? How are the colours and patterns of an eggshell created, and why do they vary? And which end of an egg is laid first - the blunt end or the pointy end? These are just some of the questions A Bird's Egg answers, as the journey of a bird's egg from creation and fertilisation to its eventual hatching is examined, with current scientific knowledge placed within an historical context. Beginning with an examination of the stunning eggs of the guillemot, each of which is so variable in pattern and colour that no two are ever the same, acclaimed ornithologist Tim Birkhead then looks at the eggs of hens, cuckoos and many other birds, revealing weird and wonderful facts about these miracles of nature. Woven around and supporting these facts are extraordinary stories of the individuals who from as far back as Ancient Egypt have been fixated on the study and collection of eggs, not always to the benefit of their conservation. Firmly grounded in science and enriched by a wealth of observation drawn from a lifetime spent studying birds,A Bird's Egg is an illuminating and engaging exploration of the science behind eggs and the history of man's obsession with them.

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

BLOOMSBURY

How are eggs of different shapes made, and why are they the shapes they are? When does the shell of an egg harden? Why do some eggs contain two yolks? How are the colours and patterns of eggshells created, and why do they vary? And which end of an egg is laid first - the blunt end or the pointy end? These are just some of the questions The Most Perfect Thing answers, as the journey of a bird's egg from creation and fertilisation to its eventual hatching is examined, with current scientific knowledge placed within an historical context. Beginning with an examination of the stunning eggs of the guillemot, each of which is so variable in pattern and colour that no two are ever the same, acclaimed ornithologist Tim Birkhead then looks at the eggs of hens, cuckoos and many other birds, revealing weird and wonderful facts about these miracles of nature. Woven around and supporting these facts are extraordinary stories of the individuals who, from as far back as ancient Egypt, have been fixated on the study and collection of eggs, not always to the benefit of their conservation. Firmly grounded in science and enriched by a wealth of observation drawn from a lifetime spent studying birds, The Most Perfect Thing is an illuminating and engaging exploration of the science behind eggs and the history of man's obsession with them.

Most Perfect Thing, The

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See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tim Birkhead. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Tim Birkhead

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tim Birkhead. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Birds and Us

Birds and Us: A 12,000 Year History, from Cave Art to Conservation

The Red Canary : The Story of the First Genetically Engineered Animal

The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology

The Red Canary : The Story of the First Genetically Engineered Animal

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

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg

Most Perfect Thing, The