Download or read book Why Birds Matter written by Çagan H. Sekercioglu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over one hundred years, ornithologists and amateur birders have jointly campaigned for the conservation of bird species, documenting not only birds’ beauty and extraordinary diversity, but also their importance to ecosystems worldwide. But while these avian enthusiasts have noted that birds eat fruit, carrion, and pests; spread seed and fertilizer; and pollinate plants, among other services, they have rarely asked what birds are worth in economic terms. In Why Birds Matter, an international collection of ornithologists, botanists, ecologists, conservation biologists, and environmental economists seeks to quantify avian ecosystem services—the myriad benefits that birds provide to humans. The first book to approach ecosystem services from an ornithological perspective, Why Birds Matter asks what economic value we can ascribe to those services, if any, and how this value should inform conservation. Chapters explore the role of birds in such important ecological dynamics as scavenging, nutrient cycling, food chains, and plant-animal interactions—all seen through the lens of human well-being—to show that quantifying avian ecosystem services is crucial when formulating contemporary conservation strategies. Both elucidating challenges and providing examples of specific ecosystem valuations and guidance for calculation, the contributors propose that in order to advance avian conservation, we need to appeal not only to hearts and minds, but also to wallets.
Download or read book Why Birds Matter written by Çagan H. Sekercioglu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explore[s] the role of birds in such important ecological dynamics as scavenging, nutrient cycling, food chains, and plant-animal interactions-- all seen through the lens of human well-being. ... The contributors show that quantifying avian ecosystem services is crucial when formulating contemporary conservation strategies."--Back cover.
Download or read book Nature All Around Birds written by Pamela Hickman and published by Kids Can Press Ltd. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perfect resource for budding bird-watchers. Because birds can be found in every neighborhood, and in all seasons, they’re an excellent choice for piquing children’s interest in wildlife. Here’s a comprehensive guide to birds that makes the perfect starting point. Beautiful pages explore many different bird species and their fascinating and unique characteristics, from feathers to eggs and nests. A year in the life of birds explains what to look for, season by season. And the beginning bird-watcher section helps kids get started in the field. Birds of a feather? More like, birds of every feather here! Kids will be grabbing their binoculars to spot them all around!
Download or read book The Seabird s Cry written by Adam Nicolson and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life itself could never have been sustainable without seabirds. As Adam Nicolson writes: "They are bringers of fertility, the deliverers of life from ocean to land." A global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds on our planet is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of the seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory. Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and NYT best-selling author Adam Nicolson has been in love with them all his life: for their mastery of wind and ocean, their aerial beauty and the unmatched wildness of the coasts and islands where every summer they return to breed. The seabird’s cry comes from an elemental layer in the story of the world. Over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on featureless seas, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Only the poets in the past would have thought of seabirds as creatures riding the ripples and currents of the entire planet, but that is what the scientists are seeing now today.
Download or read book The Discomfort Zone written by Jonathan Franzen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-08-24 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of the Year The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen's tale of growing up, squirming in his own über-sensitive skin, from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," into an adult with strong inconvenient passions. Whether he's writing about the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, or the web of connections between bird watching, his all-consuming marriage, and the problem of global warming, Franzen is always feelingly engaged with the world we live in now. The Discomfort Zone is a wise, funny, and gorgeously written self-portrait by one of America's finest writers.
Download or read book Bird Friendly Building Design written by Christine Sheppard and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Bird Friendly City written by Timothy Beatley and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a bird experience a city? A backyard? A park? As the world has become more urban, noisier from increased traffic, and brighter from streetlights and office buildings, it has also become more dangerous for countless species of birds. Warblers become disoriented by nighttime lights and collide with buildings. Ground-feeding sparrows fall prey to feral cats. Hawks and other birds-of-prey are sickened by rat poison. These name just a few of the myriad hazards. How do our cities need to change in order to reduce the threats, often created unintentionally, that have resulted in nearly three billion birds lost in North America alone since the 1970s? In The Bird-Friendly City, Timothy Beatley, a longtime advocate for intertwining the built and natural environments, takes readers on a global tour of cities that are reinventing the status quo with birds in mind. Efforts span a fascinating breadth of approaches: public education, urban planning and design, habitat restoration, architecture, art, civil disobedience, and more. Beatley shares empowering examples, including: advocates for “catios,” enclosed outdoor spaces that allow cats to enjoy backyards without being able to catch birds; a public relations campaign for vultures; and innovations in building design that balance aesthetics with preventing bird strikes. Through these changes and the others Beatley describes, it is possible to make our urban environments more welcoming to many bird species. Readers will come away motivated to implement and advocate for bird-friendly changes, with inspiring examples to draw from. Whether birds are migrating and need a temporary shelter or are taking up permanent residence in a backyard, when the environment is safer for birds, humans are happier as well.
Download or read book Bird Brother written by Rodney Stotts and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bird Brother, Rodney Stotts shares his unlikely journey to becoming a conservationist and one of America's few Black master falconers. Rodney grew up in Washington, D.C. during the crack epidemic, with guns, drugs, and the threat of incarceration affecting the lives of everyone he knew. He was no exception, but he was also employed by the newly founded Earth Conservation Corps, helping to restore and conserve the polluted Anacostia River. This work eventually sent his life in a different direction, as he began to train to become a master falconer and to develop his own raptor education program and sanctuary. Eye-opening, witty, and moving, Bird Brother is a testament to the healing power of nature, and a reminder that no matter how much heartbreak we've endured, we still have the capacity to give back to our communities and follow our dreams.
Download or read book Vesper Flights written by Helen Macdonald and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times–bestselling author of H is for Hawk explores the human relationship to the natural world in this “dazzling” essay collection (Wall Street Journal). In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife.
Download or read book The Bird Way written by Jennifer Ackerman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think. “There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries –– What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species—ours—but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call—and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.
Download or read book What It s Like to Be a Bird written by David Allen Sibley and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bird book for birders and nonbirders alike that will excite and inspire by providing a new and deeper understanding of what common, mostly backyard, birds are doing—and why: "Can birds smell?"; "Is this the same cardinal that was at my feeder last year?"; "Do robins 'hear' worms?" "The book's beauty mirrors the beauty of birds it describes so marvelously." —NPR In What It's Like to Be a Bird, David Sibley answers the most frequently asked questions about the birds we see most often. This special, large-format volume is geared as much to nonbirders as it is to the out-and-out obsessed, covering more than two hundred species and including more than 330 new illustrations by the author. While its focus is on familiar backyard birds—blue jays, nuthatches, chickadees—it also examines certain species that can be fairly easily observed, such as the seashore-dwelling Atlantic puffin. David Sibley's exacting artwork and wide-ranging expertise bring observed behaviors vividly to life. (For most species, the primary illustration is reproduced life-sized.) And while the text is aimed at adults—including fascinating new scientific research on the myriad ways birds have adapted to environmental changes—it is nontechnical, making it the perfect occasion for parents and grandparents to share their love of birds with young children, who will delight in the big, full-color illustrations of birds in action. Unlike any other book he has written, What It's Like to Be a Bird is poised to bring a whole new audience to David Sibley's world of birds.
Download or read book Winged Sentinels written by Janice Wormworth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating insight into what climate change means for birds, and the consequences of ignoring the warning signs provided by them.
Download or read book Birds and People written by Mark Cocker and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are 10,500 species of bird worldwide and wherever they occur people marvel at their glorious colours and their beautiful songs. We also trap and consume birds of every kind. Yet birds have not just been good to eat. Their feathers, which keep us warm or adorn our costumes, give birds unique mastery over the heavens. Throughout history their flight has inspired the human imagination so that birds are embedded in our religions, folklore, music and arts. Vast in both scope and scale, Birds and People explores and celebrates this relationship and draws upon Mark Cocker’s 40 years of observing and thinking about birds. Part natural history and part cultural study, it describes and maps the entire spectrum of our engagements with birds, drawing in themes of history, literature, art, cuisine, language, lore, politics and the environment. In the end, this is a book as much about us as it is about birds. Birds and People has been stunningly illustrated by one of Europe’s best wildlife photographers, David Tipling, who has travelled in 39 countries on seven continents to produce a breathtaking and unique collection of photographs. The book is as important for its visual riches as it is for its groundbreaking content. Birds and People is also exceptional in that the author has solicited contributions from people worldwide. Personal anecdotes and stories have come from more than 650 individuals in 81 different countries. They range from university academics to Mongolian eagle hunters, and from Amerindian shamans to some of the most celebrated writers of our age. The sheer multitude of voices in this global chorus means that Birds and People is both a source book on why we cherish birds and a powerful testament to their importance for all humanity.
Download or read book Living as a Bird written by Vinciane Despret and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first days of spring, birds undergo a spectacular metamorphosis. After a long winter of migration and peaceful coexistence, they suddenly begin to sing with all their might, varying each series of notes as if it were an audiophonic novel. They cannot bear the presence of other birds and begin to threaten and attack them if they cross a border, which might be invisible to human eyes but seems perfectly tangible to birds. Is this display of bird aggression just a pretence, a game that all birds play? Or do birds suddenly become territorial – and, if so, why? By attending carefully to the ways that birds construct their worlds and ornithologists have tried to understand them, Despret sheds fresh light on the activities of both and, at the same time, enables us to become more aware of the multiple worlds and modes of existence that characterize the planet we share in common with birds and other species.
Download or read book Birds Without Borders written by Nancy Trautmann and published by . This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Birds Without Borders, students analyze spatial and quantitative data, examine trends, make predictions, create management plans, and present and defend their results. Non-fiction texts and multimedia resources provide context and background for scientific exploration of real-world biodiversity data and issues in settings ranging from local to international.Wherever we live, birds share our environment. Birds provide compelling hooks to our local environment and links to foreign lands. They also provide essential ecosystem services, ranging from pollination and seed dispersal to garbage disposal and nutrient cycling.Birds Without Borders can be used as a module in biology, environmental science, general science courses, AP biology, or any other applicable science elective. The student readings and activities have been successfully used in courses ranging from seventh grade through advanced placement. This broad range is possible with differing types of scaffolding and levels of sophistication expected in data analysis and application of the results.
Download or read book The Bedside Book of Birds written by Graeme Gibson and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Birds written by Kevin Henkes and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Birds come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. Birds are magic. Birds are everywhere. If you listen very carefully you will hear them, no matter where you live. And if you look very closely you will see them, no matter where you are. And if you can't go outside right this minute, you can always read this book!
