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Author: Graham R. Martin Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192520547 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Birds are renowned for their exceptional vision and the way that this enables them to survive and navigate the world in such a unique way. However, it is now recognised that avian behaviour is guided by information drawn from many different senses which are then used in integrated and complementary ways to answer the many different sensory challenges posed by specific environments and particular tasks. Understanding how sensory information is used by birds has important applications in conservation, such as providing vital insights into why birds are prone to collisions with structures like power lines and wind turbines, and why so many diving birds become entrapped in nets. A sensory ecology approach suggests how these problems can be mitigated. The Sensory Ecology of Birds ranges widely across species, environments, and behaviours to present a synthesis that challenges previous assumptions about the information that controls the behaviour of birds. A bird may use a wide range and combination of sensory information that comes from sight, hearing, smell, mechanoreception, taste, and magnetoreception. It may also include specific refinements of senses, such as echolocation and remote touch from the bill. The book recognises that there are many complex and subtle trade-offs and complementarities of information between different types of sensory information. This accessible text will be of interest to a wide ornithological readership, from undergraduates to researchers as well as a broader audience of behavioural ecologists and evolutionary biologists.
Author: Graham R. Martin Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192520547 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Birds are renowned for their exceptional vision and the way that this enables them to survive and navigate the world in such a unique way. However, it is now recognised that avian behaviour is guided by information drawn from many different senses which are then used in integrated and complementary ways to answer the many different sensory challenges posed by specific environments and particular tasks. Understanding how sensory information is used by birds has important applications in conservation, such as providing vital insights into why birds are prone to collisions with structures like power lines and wind turbines, and why so many diving birds become entrapped in nets. A sensory ecology approach suggests how these problems can be mitigated. The Sensory Ecology of Birds ranges widely across species, environments, and behaviours to present a synthesis that challenges previous assumptions about the information that controls the behaviour of birds. A bird may use a wide range and combination of sensory information that comes from sight, hearing, smell, mechanoreception, taste, and magnetoreception. It may also include specific refinements of senses, such as echolocation and remote touch from the bill. The book recognises that there are many complex and subtle trade-offs and complementarities of information between different types of sensory information. This accessible text will be of interest to a wide ornithological readership, from undergraduates to researchers as well as a broader audience of behavioural ecologists and evolutionary biologists.
Author: Graham R. Martin Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199694532 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
1. Bird's eye views -- 2. Vision -- 3. Hearing and olfaction -- 4. Touch, taste, and magnetoreception -- 5. From senses to sensory ecology -- 6. Birds in the dark : complementary and partial information -- 7. Birds underwater : a paucity of information -- 8. What drives bird senses? -- 9. The sensory ecology of collisions and entrapment -- 10. Postscript: Conclusions, implications, and comment
Author: Graham R. Martin Publisher: Pelagic Publishing Ltd ISBN: 1784272175 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 474
Book Description
Graham Martin takes the reader deep into the world of birds from a new perspective, with a ‘through birds’ eyes’ approach to ornithology that goes beyond the traditional habitat or ecological point of view. There is a lot more to a bird’s world than what it receives through its eyes. This book shows how all of the senses complement one another to provide each species with a unique suite of information that guides their daily activities. The senses of each bird have been fine-tuned by natural selection to meet the challenges of its environment and optimise its behaviour: from spotting a carcase on a hillside, to pecking at minute insects, from catching fish in murky waters, to navigating around the globe. The reader is also introduced to the challenges posed to birds by the obstacles with which humans have cluttered their worlds, from power lines to windowpanes. All of these challenges need explaining from the birds’ sensory perspectives so that effective mitigations can be put in place. The book leads the reader through a wealth of diverse information presented in accessible text, with over 100 colour illustrations and photographs. The result is a highly readable and authoritative account, which will appeal to birdwatchers and other naturalists, as well as researchers in avian biology. The author has researched the senses of birds throughout a 50-year career in ornithology and sensory science. He has always attempted to understand birds from the perspective of how sensory information helps them to carry out different tasks in different environments. He has published papers on more than 60 bird species, from Albatrosses and Penguins, to Spoonbills and Kiwi. His first fascination was with owls and night time, and owls have remained special to him throughout his career. He has collaborated and travelled widely and pondered diverse sensory challenges that birds face in the conduct of different tasks in different habitats, from mudflats and murky waters, to forests, deserts and caves. In recent years he has focused on how understanding bird senses can help to reduce the very high levels of bird deaths that are caused by human artefacts; particularly, wind turbines, power lines, and gill nets.
Author: Tim Birkhead Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 140883054X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
What is it like to be a swift, flying at over one hundred kilometres an hour? Or a kiwi, plodding flightlessly among the humid undergrowth in the pitch dark of a New Zealand night? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise?Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other. Our affinity for birds is often said to be the result of shared senses - vision and hearing - but how exactly do their senses compare with our own? And what about a birds' sense of taste, or smell, or touch or the ability to detect the earth's magnetic field? Or the extraordinary ability of desert birds to detect rain hundreds of kilometres away - how do they do it?Bird Sense is based on a conviction that we have consistently underestimated what goes on in a bird's head. Our understanding of bird behaviour 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 behaviour.There has never been a popular book about the senses of birds. No one has previously looked at how birds interpret the world or the way the behaviour of birds is shaped by their senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of observation and an understanding of birds and their behaviour that is firmly grounded in science.
Author: Jennifer Ackerman Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0735223033 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think. “There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries –– What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species—ours—but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call—and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.
Author: J. G. M. Hans Thewissen Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520934121 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
From crocodiles and penguins to seals and whales, this comprehensive and authoritative synthesis explores the function and evolution of sensory systems in animals whose ancestors lived on land. Together, the contributors explore the dramatic transformation of smell, taste, sight, hearing, balance, mechanoreception, magnetoreception, and electroreception that occurred as lineages of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals returned to aquatic environments. Each chapter integrates data from fields including sensory physiology, anatomy, paleontology, and neurobiology. A one-stop source for information on the sense organs of secondarily aquatic tetrapods, Sensory Evolution on the Threshold sheds new light on both the evolution of aquatic vertebrates and the sensory biology of their astonishing transition.
Author: Keith L. Bildstein Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 150170785X Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 331
Book Description
Raptors are formally classified into five families and include birds—such as eagles, ospreys, kites, true hawks, buzzards, harriers, vultures, and falcons—that are familiar and recognized by many observers. These diurnal birds of prey are found on every continent except Antarctica and can thrive in seemingly inhospitable spots such as deserts and the tundra. They have powerful talons and hooked beaks for cutting and tearing meat, and keen binocular vision to aid in their hunting prowess. Because of their large size, distinctive feeding habits, and long-distance flight patterns, raptors intrigue humans and have been the subject of much general interest as well as extensive scientific research. Keith L. Bildstein has watched and studied raptors on five continents and is well prepared to explain their critical importance, not only as ecological entities but also as inspirational tokens across natural and human-dominated landscapes. His book offers a comprehensive and accessible account of raptors, including their evolutionary history, their relationships to other groups of birds, their sensory abilities, their general natural history, their breeding ecology and feeding behavior, and threats to their survival in a human-dominated world. Biologically sound but readable, Raptors is a nontechnical overview of this captivating group. It will allow naturalists, birders, hawk-watchers, science educators, schoolchildren, and the general public, along with new students in the field of raptor biology, to understand and appreciate these birds, and in so doing better protect them.
Author: Yegor B. Malashichev Publisher: CRC Press ISBN: 1498713378 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
This volume grew out of the 2nd International Symposium on Behavioral and Morphological Asymmetries, which took place in St. Petersburg (Russia) in September 2004 at the St. Petersburg State University under the patronage of the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists. The Symposium is the descendant of a satellite event with a similar name of the 4t
Author: Etienne Danchin Publisher: American Chemical Society ISBN: Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 920
Book Description
Behavioural Ecology gives a fresh, contemporary account of the evolutionary and ecological processes that underpin animal behaviour. Contributions from subject experts and meticulous editing yield a text with all the qualities of a multi-author book, but without the potential drawbacks.
Author: Graham R. Martin
Author: Graham R. Martin
Author: Graham R. Martin
Author: Martin Stevens
Author: Graham R. Martin
Author: Tim Birkhead
Author: Jennifer Ackerman
Author: J. G. M. Hans Thewissen
Author: Keith L. Bildstein
Author: Yegor B. Malashichev
Author: Etienne Danchin