Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead

If you can ignore the slightly condescending tone that waxes and wanes throughout the book, it is well worth reading and full of very cool things about birds. I would much rather read a book like Ed Yong's An Immense world, where the tone is much more "isn't this the coolest thing" than "I know more than you do". Unfortunately, this book falls hard in the camp of the later. That said, there is a lot of great material here. The book is based on a conviction that we have consistently underestimated what goes on in a bird's head. Our understanding of bird behavior is simultaneously informed and constrained by the way we watch and study them. By drawing attention to the way these frameworks both facilitate and inhibit discovery, it identifies ways we can escape from them to seek new horizons in bird behavior. The chapters walk through the senses--starting with sight, and moving on to taste, smell, touch, hearing, and emotions, we are walked through how birds, to varying degrees, have and use all their senses. As a birdwatcher in my infancy but a biologist by trade, this added a lot of interesting facts and generated ideas of what to look for when watching and enjoying birds.