Bird watching is one of the developed world’s most popular pastimes because the 10,000 or so species we have left on our planet are amazingly diverse in size, colour, shape and lifestyle. This evolutionary splendour, whether perceived that way or not by birders, can be viewed easily in our backyards and parks, or for the more adventurous, on bird-watching expeditions. The questions of “how” and “why” occur to many curious birders and have inspired hundreds of scientists, including Charles Darwin, to devote their lives to unravelling the mysteries of how birds evolved their many adaptations for flight, reproduction and survival.
Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin, by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Montgomerie, is a detailed review of the history of ornithology and chronicles the major breakthroughs in the past 150 years and the people who accomplished them...
Bridget Stutchbury is a professor at York University. Since the 1980s, she has followed songbirds to their wintering grounds in Latin America and back to their breeding grounds in North America to understand their behaviour, ecology and conservation. She is author of Silence of the Songbirds: How We Are Losing the World’s Songbirds and What We Can Do to Save Them (HarperCollins, 2007), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and The Bird Detective: Investigating the Secret Lives of Birds (HarperCollins, 2010).
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