How to Read a Bird: A Smart Guide to What Birds Do and Why

Birds are intelligent, sociable creatures that exhibit a wide array of behaviours – from mobbing and mimicking to mating and joint nesting. Why do they behave as they do? Bringing to light the remarkable actions of birds through examples from species around the world, How to Read a Bird presents engaging vignettes about the private lives of birds, all explained in an evolutionary context. Richly illustrated, this book explores the increasing focus on how individual birds differ in personality and how big data and citizen scientists are helping to add to what we know about them.

Author Biography: Dr Wenfei Tong is Assistant Professor at the University of Anchorage in Alaska. With a PhD from Harvard, Tong developed her interest in the evolution of cooperation and conflict at all levels of biological organisation in Doug Emlen’s lab at the University of Montana. A popular-science writer currently writing a new book on the family life of birds, Tong has been a STEM Ambassador at the University of Cambridge, a guest lecturer for the Harvard Natural History Museum, and guides on horseback birdwatching holidays in Montana.