The Thing With Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human
Noah Strycker
Review by Lara Little
When I stumbled into my first bower, on a blistering afternoon in the Australian outback, I thought it was some kind of religious altar or maybe a practical joke. I’d been tramping through dense bush all morning and unexpectedly emerged into a fifteen-foot-wide clearing, in the center of which stood a wicker-like construction, about two feet high, resembling a small hut. It was formed of twigs woven vertically into two thick, parallel walls that created a tunnel in between, and just outside each entrance lay a pile of white stones, bleached bones, and green leaves, clearly arranged by design. The whole tidy array was surrounded by an expanse of ground so bare that I wondered whether it had been vacuumed.
Noah Strycker has done all manner of research on countless kinds of birds. In The Thing With Feathers, he shares fascinating information about many different types of birds, delving into the whys of their behavior and what that behavior can, sometimes, reveal about our own human nature.
This book covers all types of birds, from penguins to hummingbirds. Each chapter focuses on a particular type of bird and a special characteristic of that bird—e.g. vultures and their ability to find carrion or cockatoos and whether or not they can truly dance. There are real examples—often from the author’s own research—of each kind of behavior. The chapter also relates the bird’s ability to its human counterpart—in the cockatoo example, exploring whether birds have a true sense of music and rhythm like we do.
As an admirer of birds but not a birder, I wasn’t sure how much I would get into this book. However, I found it quite interesting, if a little slow at times. The best part of each chapter was the account of actual bird behavior, such as the penguins the author encountered in Antarctica. The explanations of the behavior, including at times the history of the study of said behavior, got a bit long at times. The comparisons to human behavior were sometimes fascinating. Anyone who thinks humans are somehow far above other animals will be brought down a peg or two by this book!
Overall, this is a nice read that can be picked up and put down as desired—the chapters can even be read out of order or skipped if one just flat-out bores you. Bird lovers will devour it, and anyone interested in animal behavior—particularly as it relates to human behavior—will find something worthwhile here.
Borrow It: Fly to your local library!
