The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human

Birds are amazing. I think most people would agree with that. Birds can fly, after all. But for most of my life, I had no inkling as to how amazing they really are. Birds have amazing physical gifts including, for some, a keen sense of smell or unbelievable navigational abilities. Birds push the frontiers of where life is possible, whether in the geographical sense of penguins inhabiting the most inhospitable environments or in the physiological sense where the diminutive hummingbirds are as small as it is possible for a warm-blooded vertebrate to be. There are even some birds that seem to possess attributes – such as rhythm, emotions, even self-awareness – that we usually regard as being exclusive to humans (or at least mammals). Noah Strycker reveals just how amazing birds really are by relating these and other details in The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human.

The Thing with Feathers is comprised of 13 chapters, each one focused on a particular species or family that exemplifies an amazing aspect of birds. The first five chapters focuses on the body and includes the homing capacity of pigeons, the order of starling flocks, the sense of smell of Turkey Vultures, the wanderings of Snowy Owls, and the cost of hummingbirds’ small size. I’ve always found birds’ navigational abilities to be astounding. As Strycker describes, you can take some birds hundreds, even thousands, of miles away from their home to somewhere they have certainly never been, and they can still find their way back. But perhaps my favorite of these chapters is the one on hummingbirds. You probably already have a keen appreciation for their beauty and unique characteristics, but have you ever contemplated the implications of their small size on their lifestyle and even their lifespan? I had not. The author notes that “in terms of energy, hummingbirds live at the edge of physical possibility.” Everything about their “extreme lifestyle” – from their hyperactiveness to their cantankerousness – can be explained by this fact. If you liked hummingbirds before, they will seem all the more incredible after reading this chapter.

Part two deals with the mind by looking at fight or flight response in penguins, dancing parrots, the pecking order of chickens, and seed caching of Clark’s Nutcrackers. At first glance, these selections seem like a mixed bag – two deal with wild birds, while the other two are domestic (the dancing parrots are all pet birds). But they all have a highly scientific component, whether it’s the brain chemistry of fear, the evolution of music, or the capacity of the brain to remember information. Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed the penguin and nutcracker chapters since they dealt with the behavior of wild birds. However, I found the other two just as interesting. The dancing parrot especially so, as I had no idea it was such a big deal that a parrot demonstrated rhythm. In fact, “it marked the first time that any animal, besides us, had been shown to coordinate its movements to an external musical rhythm.”

Chapters on self-awareness in magpies, the aesthetics of bowerbird bowers, nesting cooperation in fairy-wrens, and albatross emotions make up the final part on spirit. These topics are much more abstract, dealing with such notions as self-awareness, art, altruism, and love, and are thus very conjectural. But Strycker strikes just the right balance – not anthropomorphizing beyond what is supported by science, yet still allowing that birds may experience things, like emotions, in much the same manner as we do. I’ve always been especially fascinated by the psychology of birds, their emotional lives and why they do the things they do, so this section of the book was the most satisfying to me.

There’s certainly no shortage of amazing bird stories in The Thing with Feathers. But if you’re a well-read birder you probably already know most of them. Characteristics such as navigational ability and Turkey Vultures’ smelling prowess are generally well-known. There have even been recent magazine articles discussing the wanderings of Snowy Owls (Scott Weidensaul in Audubon magazine) and the memory of Clark’s Nutcrackers (Birdwatching magazine). So why then should you read this book? First, the author does a great job in making these topics accessible and understandable for everyone. And not only that, but with personal anecdotes scattered throughout, the book is an interesting read.

Second, Strycker uses bird behavior as a mirror for our own. As he writes, “This book may be about the bird world, but it’s also about the human world.” In drawing parallels between the two, we learn almost as much about ourselves as we do about birds. For example, in the chapter on nutcrackers the author describes their amazing memory; in one fall season, nutcrackers may store tens of thousands of seeds, and yet are able to retrieve most of them even up to nine months later. He then elaborates about experiments that showed that the birds truly remembered where the caches were. But Strycker doesn’t stop there; he goes on to discuss the memory capacity of humans. He talks about “mental athletes” that compete in national and international memory contests. These people memorize things like long strings of random numbers and the order of shuffled card decks. One person memorized the order of 303 random digits in just five minutes! I had no idea such things were possible, or that competitions like this existed. He ties together the nutcracker and human memory feats by explaining that both rely on spatial memory. The nutcrackers create a mental map of where they buried seeds and these mental athletes do something similar with a “memory palace” technique.

The only illustrations found in The Thing with Feathers are black-and-white drawings at the beginning of each chapter of the bird being spotlighted. They’re very nice, and drawn by Strycker himself!

Recommendation

The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human was written by someone who is obviously captivated by birds and wants everyone to know just how amazing these creatures are. Those that don’t yet know a lot about birds will get the most out of it. In fact, you don’t even have to be a birder to appreciate this book. But even long-time birders will get something out of it, especially from the juxtaposition of bird and human behavior, which is particularly enlightening.