One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives

<b>The acclaimed scientist's encounters with individual wild birds, yielding &quot;marvelous, mind-altering&quot; (<i>Los Angeles Times</i>) insights and discoveries</b><br><br> In his modern classics <i>One Man's Owl </i>and <i>Mind of the Raven,</i> Bernd Heinrich has written memorably about his relationships with wild ravens and a great horned owl. In <i>One Wild Bird at a Time,</i> Heinrich returns to his great love: close, day-to-day observations of <i>individual</i> wild birds. There are countless books on bird behavior, but, writes Heinrich, &quot;some of the most amazing bird behaviors fall below the radar of what most birds do in aggregate.&quot; Heinrich's &quot;passionate observations [that] superbly mix memoir and science&quot; (<i>New York Times</i>) lead to fascinating questions - and sometimes startling discoveries. A great crested flycatcher bringing food to the young acts surreptitiously and is attacked by the mate. Why? A pair of Northern flickers hammering their nest-hole into the side of Heinrich's cabin deliver the opportunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings, and to make a related discovery about nest-cleaning. One of a clutch of redstart warbler babies fledges out of the nest from twenty feet above the ground, and lands on the grass below. It can't fly. What will happen next? Heinrich &quot;looks closely, with his trademark 'hands-and-knees science' at its most engaging, [delivering] what can only be called psychological marvels of knowing&quot; (<i>Boston Globe</i>) .