One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives

Summary

The acclaimed scientist’s encounters with individual wild birds, yielding “marvelous, mind-altering” (Los Angeles Times) insights and discoveries

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 and to make a related discovery about nest cleaning. One of a clutch of redstart warbler babies fledges out of the nest from twenty feet above the ground and lands on the grass below. It can’t fly. What will happen next?