the thing with feathers by noah strycker

The writing becomes wobbly, peppered with qualifiers - “might,” “seem,” “probably” - making the reader wish Strycker had stayed in his comfort zone of observing fairy wrens and buzzard’s nostrils as in the rest of this otherwise edifying and entertaining book. A chapter on the phenomenon of snowy owl irruptions (excursions outside the birds’ usual range) starts off strong, but peters out with the almost rhetorical “Do snowy owls have a wanderlust gene?” a question that neither he nor other scientists can truly answer.

Sometimes his attempts to demonstrate how the bird world applies to people’s lives result in anthropomorphic flights of fancy. In several cases, he pulls this off with aplomb, as when he deftly draws on social science, physics, video games, social media and Serena Williams to explain how murmurations (starling flocks) can fly in formation without careening into each other and how this applies to humans performing collective movements.

Strycker then links these findings to human behavior. Continue your journey in the Women’s Voices series with Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte and The Feminist Papers by Mary Wollstonecraft. (Did you know that vultures’ stomachs can neutralize anthrax spores?) Hope Is the Thing with Feathers is a collection from her vast archive of poetry to inspire the writers, creatives, and leaders of today. You could draw whole flocks of listeners by reciting his weird-but-true bird quirks and factoids. You've never read a book about birds like this one.These adventures animate most of the chapters as he homes in on the striking attributes of various species, 13 in all. With humor, style, and grace, he shows how our view of the world is often, and remarkably, through the experience of birds. Drawing deep from personal experience, cutting-edge science, and colorful history, Noah Strycker spins captivating stories about the birds in our midst and shares the startlingly intimate coexistence of birds and humans. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, the lifelong loves of albatrosses, and other mysteries-revealing why birds do what they do, and offering a glimpse into our own nature. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. Wall Street Journal An entertaining and profound look at the lives of birds, illuminating their surprising world-and deep connection with humanity. Thinks like a biologist but writes like a poet.

The thing with feathers by noah strycker