Rating: WORTHY!
This is a quite long, and a heavily-referenced and indexed book about the intelligence of birds, how it works, how it evolved, what it's used for, how it expresses itself, and why some birds seem to have a lot more of it than others - and what this means going into an uncertain and climate-changing future. The book is full of stories and studies, as well as anecdotes, and is well-written and fully-engaging. It's packed with fascinating insights and fun facts, and covers a truly wide range of birds - and not just in North American but across the world. I found it enthralling and highly educational.
If I have a couple of complaints it would be that there were no pictures here. It's possible, of course to go look up online the birds that are mentioned, but it's a nuisance. It would have been nice had each bird discussed had a color picture to go with it. There are some line drawings, but these are used to separate the sections of the book, not to illustrate the text.
The only other complain is that while a lot of studies are discussed in the book, there is no information on what happened to the poor birds? Did the studies involve euthanizing them or where they merely captured, tested, and released? Some evidently were from what I gathered from the text, but in the case of others, their fate went unrevealed, and the studies didn't seem like they were non-invasive. It's all well and good to discuss the intelligence of birds, but if scientists are raping and pillaging nature to get this information on these birds which in some cases are threatened, then it seems to me I'd rather be ignorant about their intelligence than kill them off just to satisfy human curiosity! Maybe that's just me....
It wasn't the author who was doing this of course! She was merely reporting, but for a good reporter, especially one who seems to be so invested in her subject, you would think she'd have a care for the welfare of the subject. That aside, I did enjoy reading the book. It was well-written and it was a worthy read, so I commend it.
