the thing with feathers by noah strycker

Both had their eyes half closed, completely relaxed. When one breathed, the other moved slightly. “If love has evolved just like any physical characteristic,” Strycker writes, “then there is no reason for it to be uniquely human.” Of a pair of black-browed albatrosses he observed napping together in the Falkland Islands, he wrote: “their heads rested softly against each other. Projecting human emotions onto animals is seen as a childish instinct we ought to resist in the name of scientific objectivity.īut, as Strycker points out, humans are animals if emotion is evolutionarily advantageous for us, why shouldn’t an albatross also love? Albatrosses pair up for life, and despite spending months and even years separated at sea, they remain faithful and meet up on their home islands as if on pre-arranged dates. Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, the Norwegian student who coined the term “pecking order” after watching his mother’s chickens line up at the feeding tray in the 1910s, was ridiculed for ascribing human personality traits to birds.

You’ve never read a book about birds like this one.In Noah Strycker’s new book, The Thing With Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human, Stryckler occasionally pauses to contemplate the “problem” of anthropomorphism. With humor, style, and grace, he shows how our view of the world is often, and remarkably, through the experience of birds. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, the lifelong loves of albatrosses, and other mysteries-revealing why birds do what they do, and offering a glimpse into our own nature.ĭrawing deep from personal experience, cutting-edge science, and colorful history, Noah Strycker spins captivating stories about the birds in our midst and shares the startlingly intimate coexistence of birds and humans. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. ' thinks like a biologist but writes like a poet.' - Wall Street JournalĪn entertaining and profound look at the lives of birds, illuminating their surprising world-and deep connection with humanity.īirds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood.

The thing with feathers by noah strycker