Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Birds for a BINGO Board Blackout

The Wisdom of Birds, An Illustrated History of Ornithology by Tim Birkhead

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CBR 17 BINGO: Migrant, because many bird species migrate. Quadruple Bingo and Board Blackout! Across: Migrant, Review, Black, School, Rec’d Down: Migrant, Play, “B“, Favorite, Arts Diagonal: Migrant, Purple, “N“, Border, White Four corners and the center: Migrant, Rec’d, White, Arts, “N” The title of Tim Birkhead’s The Wisdom of Birds is misleading if you fail to read the subtitle, An Illustrated History of Ornithology, which sums up the book nicely. One might wonder why the author didn’t just go with a more precise title, […]

Science begins at home (includes link to a fun video if you’re having a bad day)

One Wild Bird at a Time by Bernd Heinrich

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CBR16 BINGO: Earth Day, because it’s about observing birds and nature BINGO (diagonal): Bananas, Cult, Dreams, Earth Day, Rings Bernd Heinrich is a biologist/naturalist/professor who has written numerous books about birds and bird behavior. I’ve read some of his other books and found them to be a little dense, but he is clearly an expert in the field and an avid bird lover. In One Wild Bird at a Time, he encourage his readers to conduct their own experiments by closely observing the world around […]

Owls are fan favorites

What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

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It seems to me that even people who are lukewarm about birds get excited about owls. Whether you associate them with wisdom (thanks to their connection with the goddess Athena), stuffy know-it-all-ness (à la Winnie the Pooh’s pal), or as messengers (everything from Native American folklore to Harry Potter), you have undoubtedly encountered stories about owls in some area of your early life or education. Perhaps it’s their large, all-knowing eyes, or their stillness, or the way they swoop in almost without a sound that […]

Cute illustrations make me happy, Part 2

The Atlas of Amazing Birds by Matt Sewell

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CBR15 BINGO: Picture This, because the illustrations are the best part Last year, when I reviewed Penguins and Other Seabirds, I discovered that Matt Sewell has published other collections of his delightful bird illustrations, and I longed to get my hands on some of them. To my delight, I received The Atlas of Amazing Birds for Christmas last year. As with Penguins and Other Seabirds, Sewell’s Atlas of Amazing Birds features small snippets–a paragraph or two at most–about each species along with a beautiful watercolor illustration, […]

In the 17th century, birds were appreciated for their beauty, and also their tastiness

Pasta for Nightingales: A 17th-Century Handbook of Bird-Care and Folklore by Giovanni Pietro Olina

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The common hoopoe gets drunk on fermented grapes; goldfinches suffer from epilepsy; to properly keep francolins, you must keep a small crate or case within the aviary for the birds to nestle down in. These are just a few of the handy tips that Giovani Pietro Olina offers in his 17th-century handbook on bird care, Pasta for Nightingales. This charming little tome is an English translation of a book written in 1622, called Uccelliera, which is Italian for The Aviary. The title of the English […]

Advanced Bird Nerdery

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg by Tim Birkhead

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With the exception, perhaps, of the most dedicated vegan, all of us have cracked open an egg at some point in our lives: to scramble for breakfast, to make an egg drop soup, or, for those more reckless in our diet, to whip up a rich creme brûlée. Yet how many of us have ever paused to wonder about the complex mechanisms that go into the creation of the egg itself? A 19th-century abolitionist named Thomas Wentworth Higginson once said, “If required on pain of death […]



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