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Slow Birding
- The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard
- Narrated by: Joan E. Strassmann
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
A one-of-a-kind guide to birding locally that encourages listeners to slow down and notice the spectacular birds all around them.
Many birders travel far and wide to popular birding destinations to catch sight of rare or “exotic” birds. In Slow Birding, evolutionary biologist Joan E. Strassmann introduces listeners to the joys of birding right where they are.
In this inspiring guide to the art of slow birding, Strassmann tells colorful stories of the most common birds to be found in the United States—birds we often see but might not have considered deeply before. For example, northern cardinals thrive in the city, where they are free from predators. White brows on a male white-throated sparrow indicate that he is likely to be a philanderer. This essential guide to the fascinating world of common, everyday birds features:
- Detailed portraits of individual bird species and the scientists who have discovered and observed them
- Advice and guidance on what to look for when slow birding, so that you can uncover clues to the reasons behind specific bird behaviors
- Bird-focused activities that will open your eyes more to the fascinating world of birds
Slow Birding is the perfect guide for the birder looking to appreciate the beauty of the birds right in their own backyard, observing keenly how their behaviors change from day to day and season to season.
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In One Wild Bird at a Time, Heinrich returns to his great love: close, day-to-day observations of individual wild birds. Heinrich's observations lead to fascinating questions - and sometimes startling discoveries. A great crested flycatcher bringing food to the young acts surreptitiously and is attacked by the mate. Why? A pair of northern flickers hammering their nest-hole into the side of Heinrich's cabin delivers the opportunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings.
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An Adventure In Nature
- By Sara on 12-21-16
By: Bernd Heinrich
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Superlative
- The Biology of Extremes
- By: Matthew D. LaPlante
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms. For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.
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Fascinating survey of amazing biology
- By Nerd's-eye view on 12-06-19
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Nature's Best Hope
- A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard
- By: Douglas W. Tallamy
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Douglas W. Tallamy's first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of individuals to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation.
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A must read for everybody! Not just nature lovers.
- By Steve Ebert on 06-11-20
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Feathers
- The Evolution of a Natural Miracle
- By: Thor Hanson
- Narrated by: Andy Ingalls
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Feathers are an evolutionary marvel: Aerodynamic, insulating, beguiling. They date back more than 100 million years. Yet their story has never been fully told. In Feathers, biologist Thor Hanson details a sweeping natural history, as feathers have been used to fly, protect, attract, and adorn through time and place. Applying the research of paleontologists, ornithologists, biologists, engineers, and even art historians, Hanson asks: What are feathers? How did they evolve? What do they mean to us?
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Fantastic Science and Fun
- By Chris Reich on 12-28-14
By: Thor Hanson
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The Hidden Life of Trees
- What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World
- By: Peter Wohlleben
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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How do trees live? Do they feel pain or have awareness of their surroundings? Research is now suggesting trees are capable of much more than we have ever known. In The Hidden Life of Trees, forester Peter Wohlleben puts groundbreaking scientific discoveries into a language everyone can relate to.
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Tree Hugger
- By Darwin8u on 04-18-19
By: Peter Wohlleben
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Becoming Wild
- How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace
- By: Carl Safina
- Narrated by: Carl Safina
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Some people insist that culture is strictly a human feat. What are they afraid of? This book looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth's remaining wild places. It shows how if you're a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual in a particular community. You too are who you are not by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance. And your culture, too, changes and evolves.
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It all sinks in over the story—highly recommend
- By Knitting Fisherman on 06-13-20
By: Carl Safina
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Wild Ones
- A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America
- By: Jon Mooallem
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Jon Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it.
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The line between conservation and domestication...
- By Bonny on 04-02-14
By: Jon Mooallem
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The Bald Eagle
- The Improbable Journey of America's Bird
- By: Jack E. Davis
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you’re not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as “majestic” and “noble,” yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies.
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I thought the book would be about the bald eagle
- By An Amazon Buyer on 10-25-22
By: Jack E. Davis
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How to Read Nature
- An Expert's Guide to Discovering the Outdoors You've Never Noticed
- By: Tristan Gooley
- Narrated by: Qarie Marshall
- Length: 3 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides to shut down their senses and stumble through each day in an oblivious bubble, and yet some people end up having much richer experiences than others. In this guidebook, natural navigator Tristan Gooley strives to reawaken our senses to help us understand and deepen our personal experience of nature. His message is to connect - however we can and to whatever draws us in.
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A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees
- By Mark A Bleakley on 08-07-18
By: Tristan Gooley
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The Triumph of Seeds
- How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History
- By: Thor Hanson
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.
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Delightfully simplistic!
- By Adrian on 03-30-16
By: Thor Hanson
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Our Wild Calling
- How Connecting with Animals Can Transform Our Lives - and Save Theirs
- By: Richard Louv
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard Louv's landmark book, Last Child in the Woods, inspired an international movement to connect children and nature. Now Louv redefines the future of human-animal coexistence. Our Wild Calling explores these powerful and mysterious bonds and how they can transform our mental, physical, and spiritual lives, serve as an antidote to the growing epidemic of human loneliness, and help us tap into the empathy required to preserve life on Earth.
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Sharing our world
- By Scott Br on 10-06-21
By: Richard Louv
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The Most Perfect Thing
- By: Tim Birkhead
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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How are eggs of different shapes made, and why are they the shapes they are? When does the shell of an egg harden? Why do some eggs contain two yolks? How are the colours and patterns of eggshells created, and why do they vary? And which end of an egg is laid first - the blunt end or the pointy end?
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Great book about eggs!!
- By Timothy on 03-24-21
By: Tim Birkhead
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Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You
- A Lively Tour Through the Dark Side of the Natural World
- By: Dan Riskin
- Narrated by: Dan Riskin
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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It may be a wonderful world, but as Dan Riskin explains, it's also a dangerous, disturbing, and disgusting one. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to eat us, poison us, use our bodies as their homes, or have us spread their eggs. In Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You, Riskin is our guide through the natural world at its most gloriously ruthless. Using the seven deadly sins as a road map, Riskin offers dozens of jaw-dropping examples that illuminate how brutal nature can truly be.
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Just a bunch of random animal behaviors.
- By Goddess on 05-18-23
By: Dan Riskin
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Know a Birder? This will help you Understand.
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Birding to Change the World
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For the past century, scientists and naturalists have been steadily unravelling the secrets of bird migration. How and why birds navigate the skies, traveling from continent to continent—flying thousands of miles across the earth each fall and spring—has continually fascinated the human imagination, but only recently have we been able to fully understand these amazing journeys.
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Finding the Mother Tree
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Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide. In this, her first book, now available in audio, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life.
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Couldn't finish, will try the hard copy
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What listeners say about Slow Birding
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Carl
- 07-08-23
Everyone should read this
An excellent survey of several wonderful and common birds, and of the techniques of careful observation.
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- Desertpat
- 06-23-23
Fun learning for all levels of bird lovers.
So much of birding in the field is not about behavior but just species identification. This book is perfect to fill in that gap.
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- IWONDER
- 12-11-23
A combination of science and personal experience
Dr. Strassmann is an evolutionary scientist who observes birds daily. Reading her perspective on local birds is fascinating. She provides behavioral science information grounded in papers and research. The book reflects her interests in mating, sexual selection, natural selection, parental attention, etc. Dr. Strassmann shares personal experiences of bird watching and recording. If you enjoy fun scientific facts and are open to being led wherever, this book is epic. However, if you seek a guide for bird identification, this might not be the right choice.
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- Marjorie
- 04-03-23
lovely book about the author and her local birds
This book promotes REALLY looking at birds... at the birds one sees and hears from a backyard, a local park or the nearby countryside. It is the complete opposite of books that describe trips to the ends of the earth to 'see' the rarest of rare birds and check it off a life list. From sparrow to robins to cedar waxwings, the author describes many details of how each of these common birds live. I particularly loved hearing about the experiments that elucidate bird life-styles - monogamy, paternal care, competition etc. In the process, the author also reveals much about her life as an academic researcher and citizen of the Midwest.
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- Great Books
- 09-29-23
Somewhat interesting but oh so painful
Really tough to listen to, tried several times and finally gave up. The content is interesting, the writing is not great, I should have skipped it.
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- S. Gunn
- 08-02-24
Beware: This Book Is Not (Really) About Birding
As a fellow St. Louisan, a fellow member of the Washington University community, and a fellow slow birder, I was really looking forward to enjoying this book. My family and I listened to the whole book on a cross country trip. We felt let down. The book does not deliver on its title. It is more about science than birding.
Strassman describes the concept of slow birding, which includes birding in your own backyard and at nearby parks, wildlife reserves and bodies of water, and which may involve spending an hour or more observing a few birds, instead of racing around the state, country, or globe in search of rare birds to check them off a birding list.
Strassman discusses many of the birds we see in our garden, which we appreciated, but she curiously omits one of St. Louis’ rare gems, the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, a bird introduced to St. Louis from Germany in 1870 and a bird that David Sibley says is rare and still to this day local to St. Louis. A missed opportunity, but not the biggest one in Strassman’s book.
Strassman gives numerous tips on how to slow bird for each of the species she discusses. But most of the tips are bare bones and repetitive: find and identify the bird, look for the birds’ nests, watch a single bird for five minutes or more, enter your findings on eBird or in a journal, etc. What’s more, Strassman rarely shares details of her own experiences slow birding. It would be wonderful to hear how Strassman implements her own tips and what she discovers during her own birding sessions. That she rarely shares these stories is the real missed opportunity.
Instead, Strassman recounts the results of scores and scores, if not hundreds and hundreds, of scientific experiments performed by others, not by Strassman herself, on the birds. Some of the science is very interesting, but at times Strassman’s retelling is tedious and bogged down in minutia, and many of the studies are repetitious. I love the birds Strassman discusses, and I enjoyed hearing her walk us through the scientific literature, but I kept feeling a little bit cheated, thinking to myself “when is she going to talk about birding?” She rarely does.
Also, beware that some of the experiments were performed over a century ago, when there were different ethical standards about the treatment of animals and fewer, if any, laws protecting migratory birds. For bird lovers it can be jarring to hear about scientists killing birds to examine their “stomach” contents, making incisions in birds and inserting things into them, attaching weights to their feathers, separating birds from their chicks, etc. Wasn’t this supposed to a book about birding? Strassman sometimes describes the scientific study of birds as slow birding, which seems to stretch the concept to the breaking point.
There is something of a pattern to this book, which emerges very quickly. Each bird chapter begins with a description of a bird and a quick nod to birding for that species and then dives into an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) tour of the scientific literature concerning that species. Each chapter ends with a tribute to the bird and suggestions for how you, the listener, might slow bird for that species, but without many illustrative or instructive examples.
In the end, the book is a worthy synthesis of the scientific research performed by other ornithologists and biologists, but it is hardly a satisfying (or intimate) book about slow birding. I will be looking elsewhere for a more personal account of slow birding.
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