![]() ![]() Young birds that devote themselves to feeding their siblings and others so competitive they'll stab their nestmates to death. Some of these behaviours 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. They're also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own – deception, manipulation, kidnapping, infanticide, but also, ingenious communication between species, collaboration, altruism and play. What they're finding is upending the traditional view of how birds live, how they communicate, forage, court, survive. But lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviours they've previously dismissed as anomalies. ‘There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.' This is one scientist's pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind. 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. ![]()
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