The Social Lives of Birds

For those of us drawn to watch birds, few aspects are more awe-inspiring and mind-blowing than their propensity to live with others of their clan. Strassmann digs deep into the fascinating social world of birds, bringing a scientist's critical eye and a novelist's sharp pen to interpret and understand its dizzying diversity

Joan Strassmann knows the social life of birds almost as well as birds do. A delightful and informative flight into sociality in our avian friends

The main features of birds most of us are interested in concern their feathers, flight, nesting, feeding, foraging, mating, predator evasion, migration, and group vs. solitary behavior. If I were to read any book on what birds are all about, I could not recommend one more than this one. I know of no other book that so thoroughly covers the hugely extensive scientific literature from the experts who spend their lives and fortunes on their work. This book is a must-read for all birders and a clear-eyed pleasure for anyone interested in Nature

In this elegant and masterful treatment of avian life, the biologist Joan Strassmann makes it abundantly clear that the proverb 'birds of a feather flock together' is one massive understatement. Birds variously pair up, lek, roost, form colonies, team up to assist the parent, breed communally, and turn super-social. She will intrigue the novice while transporting even the most knowledgeable bird lover in fresh and unexpected directions

Birds of a feather not only flock together, but sleep, feed, migrate, mate, and raise young together, too. Sometimes birds move about and live together with only their own species and sometimes they are in mixed flocks. Joan Strassmann, a world-leading scientist on the communal lives of diverse lineages of life on Earth, clearly explains the benefits and costs of the different ways in which birds spend time together. Her easy-to-follow writing is based on scientific findings from peer-reviewed literature, and it takes us from parasitic cowbirds in the Americas to penguins in Antarctica and drongos in India. The world, as she explains, is a more interesting place, because we humans share so much with birds when it comes to living and loving together