What It's Like To Be a Bird by David Allen Sibley

What It’s Like To Be a Bird
By David Allen Sibley
Knopf, 2020

Renowned ornithologist David Allen Sibley adapts the title of his new book What It’s Like To Be a Bird from a famous 1974 essay by Thomas Nagel called “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” Nagel’s question, despite Nagel’s own tergiversation on the subject, is obviously completely unanswerable in a world without Vulcan mind-melds, and maybe not even then: after all, how many humans, armed with some of the planet’s best language skills, could even begin to make a useful answer to “What Is It Like To Be a Human”? 

Books have to have titles, and to his credit, Sibley doesn’t seem much concerned with even posing his book’s title much less answering it. Instead, he takes readers through the development, appearance, evolution, distribution, and most of all behavior of a couple-dozen famous bird species like warblers, crows, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, jays, robins, ducks, and owls. Each is given at least a two-page spread, and in addition to a barrage of fascinating facts (“A bird’s ears are on the side of the head behind and below the eye,” for instance, or “If you look closely at a bird’s legs you’ll see that the ‘knee’ joint seems to bend the wrong way - but that’s because it’s actually the ankle joint”), these pages are full of Sibley’s own artwork: color drawings of birds in every mood and motion, and black-and-white drawings of a more anatomical, informational nature. 

And all along the way, hundreds of bird behaviors are explained in great, sometimes wonky detail:

Dust bathing is a common behavior in certain species, such as the House Sparrow. You might find small bowl-shaped depressions in the ground where House Sparrows habitually take dust baths. The birds’ motions are similar to a typical water bath, crouching into the dust and then shaking the wings to move dust up and over the body. The reason for dust baths is unknown, but one hypothesis is that the dust interacts with preen oil in some beneficial way. The right amount of preen oil helps waterproof and condition the feathers, inhibits bacteria and so on. Too much oil could cause feather barbs to stick together, provide food for bacteria and parasites, and more. Dusting may be a way to control oil levels or change the oil’s properties.

It’s been twenty years since Sibley’s magnificent, breakout hit The Sibley Guide to Birds, and What It’s Like to Be a Bird much more closely resembles his later book The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior in that it’s trying to draw readers not into the identification of species in the field but into the world of birds, the why and how of what they do all day long. And its larger size and beautiful artwork makes it the perfect bird book to share with kids. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.