Bowerbirds

This is the authoritative, comprehensive and definitive popular work on bowerbirds. Bowerbirds are the most remarkable and fascinating of living birds because of their amazingly human-like, complex, and artistic behaviour.

Males build architecturally complex structures, called bowers. Some bowers are like miniature buildings and are artistically decorated with flowers, fruits, bones, shells, feathers and much more, including numerous human artefacts. Birds even paint their bowers, some applying pigment to bower walls by the use of a tool! Males vigorously compete by destroying each other’s bowers and by stealing bower decorations from one another. All this is performed to attract, court, and mate females at bowers. But it is very much the females that have the males jumping through hoops for them!

So incredible is much of what bowerbirds do that early bird authorities suggested they be given a class of their own, just as humans were held apart from other animals. Bowerbirds were once thought to be far more intelligent than other birds, and while this is no longer considered true recent research has shown they have larger brains than similar songbirds of their region (Australia and New Guinea only).

The book contains exceptionally high quality photography of, often rare, wild birds and is complimented by great and rare bird art of the 19th century – all presented in an interesting and novel design.

Winner of the 2008 Whitley Award in the category of “Field Natural History”. This prestigious award is given by the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales for outstanding publications that deal with the promotion and conservation of Australasian fauna.