Beaks, Bones and Bird Songs

How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior

By: Roger Lederer

Narrated by: Charles Constant

When we see a bird flying from branch to branch happily chirping, it is easy to imagine they lead a simple life of freedom, flight, and feathers. What we don't see is the arduous, life-threatening challenges they face at every moment. Beaks, Bones and Bird Songs guides the listener through the myriad, and often almost miraculous, things that birds do every day to merely stay alive. Like the goldfinch, which manages extreme weather changes by doubling the density of its plumage in winter. Or urban birds, which navigate traffic through a keen understanding of posted speed limits. In engaging and accessible prose, Roger Lederer shares how and why birds use their sensory abilities to see ultraviolet, find food without seeing it, fly thousands of miles without stopping, change their songs in noisy cities, navigate by smell, and much more.

©2016 Roger J. Lederer (P)2017 Tantor

Critic reviews

"An exceptional overview of the life, adaptations, and impressive skill sets of wild birds...Highly recommended for all interested in natural history and the impact of humans on the natural world." ( Library Journal)

Facts mixed with EVOLUTION

This is interesting information however, it's frequently filled with evolution information about what a bird evolved from rather than what characteristics are at present. I wasn't looking for an evolution book and it just became frustrating to listen to what they used to be 10 billion years ago.
I didn't finish it for that reason alone. It became too frustrating.

Birds I hardly knew you

This book exposed me to so much knowledge about birds. We really need to help these endangered species or their song and benifts will disappear and we will all lose.

A Compact and Fascinating Overview of Birds

Beaks, Bones, and Bird Songs (2016) by Roger Lederer is all about its subtitle: How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior. Lederer covers Foraging, Sensory Abilities, Flight, Migration and Navigation, Survival Strategies for Weather, Communities, and Human Influence. The book percolates with interesting information on birds in general and on particular species. As he proceeds, Lederer also covers a bit of the history of ornithology, citing earlier landmark studies and explanations of birds that according to contemporary science are either woefully incorrect or still accurate.

Throughout, the main point Lederer repeatedly demonstrates is that birds are amazing creatures of incredible diversity in their habitats, sizes, shapes, physiologies, lifestyles, abilities, and so on. While being perfectly adapted to their environments over millennia and even millions of years, birds’ existence is increasingly threatened and changed by human activity (cities, habitat degradation, hunting, etc. etc.). Everyday life is a struggle for survival which birds negotiate with all their intelligence, learning, and senses, making choices about how and where and when to forage for food, to nest and raise young, and to migrate, etc., all to maximize chances for success and minimize chances for failure. Although he does not push a didactic conservation agenda, he does reveal ways in which humans harmfully or helpfully affect avian life and concludes that “We have to be partners with birds.”

Here are some examples of the interesting things I learned from the book:

Why birds don’t have teeth and how gizzards partially replace them.
How sandpipers detect prey deep in sandy mud without seeing or smelling them.
Why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.
Why vultures defecate on their feet and have bald heads.
How birds see colors and UV etc. and use one eye or both eyes etc.
Why birds sing (it’s not for joy).
How birds fly (including soaring, gliding, diving, etc.).
How flocks and formations work (including how birds in dense flocks avoid flying into each other).
Why some birds migrate (and how they know when to go and how they fly such long distances).
How birds use sun maps, star maps, geomagnetic crystals, olfaction, infrasound, and landmarks to navigate.
How birds adjust their body temperatures to deal with cold and heat.
How and why birds mob (gang up on larger predators).
The Arctic Tern flies to the Antarctic and back, up to 66,000 miles per year, enough for three round trips to the moon if they live full life spans.
Acorn woodpeckers wedge acorns into trees so tightly that no other animals or birds can remove them, so they themselves can later break them open to get the nuts.
If other jays see them hiding their acorn caches, they’ll hide them again later, but only if they themselves are cache robbers.
Babies still in eggs tell parents to turn them right side up or make them warmer etc.
In each ecosystem and niche and guild, each bird plays a particular role in relationships with the other living parts of the environment.
Birds can get drunk on fermented fruit.
Diversity in an ecosystem is necessary, like a sophisticated and complicated watch with many functions and parts: remove enough of the parts and it will finally stop working.
Evolution and natural selection are good at making creatures change to suit changing environments etc., but since industrial revolution the pace of change has outstripped what evolution can do.
Birds in cities develop differently (behavior, color, wing size, song frequency, egg laying, singing, migrating or not, viability, etc.) from the same species in the country.
Global warming is making birds migrate earlier and fly farther north and breed earlier, etc.

Anyone interested in birds should read this book, though perhaps ornithologists and other experts might not find as much new interesting information as I did.

The audiobook reader Charles Constant is professional and smooth, though perhaps he reads a touch more speedily than I’d have liked.

Very informative

i enjoyed the readers voice. this book has so many interesting facts about birds. i loved it. if you like birds it's a must have.

Fantastic and informative!

I'm an ornithologist and have worked with birds for over 20 years. Even I learned some new things in this book. It was so well narrated, and easy listening.

very dense but good info

this book has a ton of great information, but there are parts where it can be so scientifically dense that even I had to take breaks from it. still recommend for bird lovers, but don't expect to binge listen.

learned a lot

so the good news is the book is filled with information that the common bird enthusiast might not know
it's not even bad news but I just wish there was more information on action plans
what can I do to help and how can I take action?

A Layperson-Comprehensible Look at Bird Evolution

This was a quite enjoyable look at today's birds, what factors influenced the evolution of many of their characteristics, and how and why they specialize as they do.

However, I missed hearing samples of the bird songs - I had hoped from the title to be able to hear them.

Curious about birds.

Enjoyed the book. It's not-too-technical story telling tempo is great for a long car ride. I've been watching and photographing birds for over 15 years and it was good to hear things not necessarily in any text book or birding guide.

A must read for birders

Full of fascinating information, this book is perfect for Bird Nerds like me. Even those with a passing interest in the natural would should be impressed with what they learn.