The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman
Published June 2020 by Little, Brown Book Group
Reviewed October 2023 by Joel Stephens
Jennifer is a leader in her field. A scientist with well documented credentials in the world of birds. In The Bird Way, Jennifer has searched the world for fascinating avian research both contemporary and historic. She binds this information together with her own expert knowledge and experiences to create a most enjoyable read.
Five pillars of behavior are presented: Talk, Work, Play, Love and Parenting. Each pillar is presented to show the rainbow of diverse behaviors that exist in the avian world. There are rules and every rule is broken in every way possible. Speaking for myself, most of the information was new. I particularly loved the examples which cracked the egg on common everyday North American birds. I had no idea how complex a life these little creatures lived.
Talk – Incubating Carolina Chickadees hiss like a copperhead to deter squirrels from assaulting their nest.
Work – Pinyon Jays, Black-capped Chickadees and Clark’s Nutcrackers can remember thousands of caching locations for months.
Play – “Scientists recognize three main types of play, and ravens revel in all of them.”
Love – I had no idea that mallards were such deviates. Rapists, homosexual necrophilia…need I say more. That’s hardly an example of Love, but that is the pillar she put it in.
Parenting – The amazing story of parasitic cuckoos (including our yellow-billed cuckoo). Brood parasites are in a coevolutionary arms race with the host to match egg shape, size and color to avoid detection.
Conclusion: Great book, every nature lover needs to read this.
Reading Between the Lines and Inclusive Comedically Intended Commentary
I believe Jennifer is a woman among women, carrying a torch for her sex wherever and whenever possible. She recognizes that the fairer sex is underrepresented in her field today and was almost nonexistent in the early days, she makes sure to include research from female scientists whenever possible. I tip my hat to her.
Additionally, she points out that in the early days of male dominance some wrong conclusions were drawn. One example, bird song amongst females. Ok. True that, but was it because they were men, as implied? Maybe the technology and mobility were significantly less than in the last 40 yrs? Also, in her conclusion, “Through new science, we’ve shed the belief that female birds are just along for the ride…” (I assume the new science might just involve female researchers.) She happily finds and presents research where John James Audubon is found to be wrong. Betsy Bang not only disproved Audubon’s theory on olfactory acuity in vultures she “crushed” it, “fortunately”. Let’s see, there was 140yrs of progress between one conclusion and the other.
Of course, no discussion on bird behaviors is complete without a discussion of SEX. This theme permeates every chapter. Yes, there is a chapter dedicated to SEX (I read that one first), but there is so much more sex in this book that you might wonder why. When discussing the fact that birds copulate in public, (there are bird species that don’t follow this rule) unlike most people who copulate privately, she gives the example, “Sea Gulls do it on the beach.”. I sensed a hint of jealousy in the text.
I would also have to say that she ran a DEI app on the manuscript or perhaps had an advisor in this area. Much text (perhaps a disproportionate amount) discusses consensual homosexual behavior in birds. In fact, the last line from the chapter, Sex is “They love who they love.” Now where have I heard that before? Words like rainbow, on-a-spectrum and non-binary are used in similar context as what you might expect.
No matter how captivated you are by the text of The Bird Way, don’t be roped in to thinking it will have a happy ending. Its factual, not a movie. The final thought is “Perhaps someday dinosaurs in the form of corvids will dig us up to figure out what happened to us.” and hoping they don’t make the same mistakes we did.
I guess that’s it, we are doomed. Lovely. I need a drink now.
Joel Stephens
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