REVIEW: What It's Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing : What Birds Are Doing and Why (nonfiction book) by David Allen Sibley

What It's Like to Be a Bird is nonfiction. I bought my copy used, I think.

Review:

Although I did indeed read this straight through from start to finish (a few pages a night before bedtime), this isn't really a book meant for that. The introduction drives that home by acting as a sort of annotated index, grouping information into categories like "feathers," "bird senses," "food and foraging," etc. If any of the bulleted tidbits of info intrigue you, you can follow the page number they provide to one of the bird portfolios that make up the bulk of this book and read a little more detail. 

As for the bird portfolios, water birds are covered first, then land birds. Each bird portfolio includes a roughly life-size painting of an example species or two (so, for instance, the painting of a Brown Pelican is only able to feature most of its head, whereas the Killdeer painting features the whole bird), in addition to illustrations of everything from a Bald Eagle's line of sight to the structure of hummingbird tongues and more.

The paintings and illustrations are fabulous and make this book a joy to flip through. The "essays" are short bulleted paragraphs that expand upon information mentioned briefly in the introduction and use specific kinds of birds as examples. There's only enough time and space to just barely scratch the surface, but it all still made for fascinating reading.

I didn't exactly come away from this understanding what it's like to be a bird, and in some ways they ended up feeling even more alien to me. That wasn't unexpected, however, and I still had fun trying to wrap my brain around different bird senses, behaviors, and ways of living.