Birdology

Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop
Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur
by Sy Montgomery
Free Press, 2010. 260 pgs. Non-Fiction.

I have always felt comfortable calling someone a birdbrain whose intellect I wanted to impugn. Wrong again. Even chickens are much smarter than we give them credit for, according to award-winning nature writer Sy Montgomery and she should know. A keeper of hens for much of her adult life, she branches (sorry) way out from the henhouse in this fascinating book about the high art and savagery of falconry, how birds migrate so accurately (they can "see" the magnetic fields of the earth), and how crows put walnuts under the wheels of cars at stoplights and then go back for the nutmeats after the cars have passed. Not such birdbrains after all. My favorite bird in this book is the cassowary, the aforementioned dinosaur bird who is most closely related to and looks most like its dinosaur ancestors, and who could peck your head off if he felt threatened. Birds, as Ms. Montgomery says, are the only wildlife most people see every day. It is instructive to know what intelligent company we are keeping.