Our Feathered Friends
THE BIRD WAY: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think
BY JENNIFER ACKERMAN
Penguin Press, 368 pp., $28
GABRIELLE NEVITT GREW up enthralled with birds. Not just the birds at the feeder or in the woods near her home. She knew birds intimately—because they lived with her in her house.
She carried a pet bantam rooster around like a doll. She remembers the sweet scent at the base of his comb. The hackle feathers of his neck smelled like a plum tree, or grass, or like eucalyptus. The family’s mynah bird, she remembered, “smelled dusty, except on his earlobe.” They had a parrot, too, and
