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One wild bird at a time : portraits of individual lives / Bernd Heinrich.

by Heinrich, Bernd, 1940-

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Birds -- Maine -- Anecdotes.

Animal behavior.

9780544387638 (hc.)

ix, 210 pages, [8] pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Flickers nesting in the house -- A quintet of crows -- Getting to know a starling -- Woodpecker with a drum -- Barred owl talking -- Hawk tablecloths -- Vireo birth control -- Nuthatch home-making -- Blue jays in touch -- Chickadees in winter -- Redpolls tunneling in snow -- Tracking grouse in winter -- Crested flycatcher's nest helpers -- Red-winged blackbirds returning -- Phoebe seasons -- Evening grosbeaks -- Audience to a woodcock.

Heinrich returns to his great love: close, day-to-day observations of individual wild birds. There are countless books on bird behavior, but Heinrich argues that some of the most amazing bird behaviors fall below the radar of what most birds do in aggregate. Heinrich's zpassionate observations superbly mix memoir and sciencey and lead to fascinating questions and sometimes startling discoveries. A great crested flycatcher, while bringing food to the young in their nest, is attacked by the other flycatcher nearby. Why? A pair of Northern flickers hammering their nest-hole into the side of Heinrichs cabin deliver the opportunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings, and to make a related discovery about nest-cleaning. One of a clutch of redstart warbler babies fledges out of the nest from twenty feet above the ground, and lands on the grass below. It cant fly. What will happen next? Bernd Heinrich is a professor emeritus in the biology department at the University of Vermont and is the author of a number of books about nature writing, behavior, biology, ecology, and evolution.

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