Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Life Sciences - Zoology - Ornithology

The variety of social systems among the New World blackbirds (Family Icteridae) and the structural simplicity of their foraging environment provide excellent opportunities for testing theorics about the adaptive significance of their behavior. Here Gordon Orians presents the results of his many years of research on how blackbirds utilize their marsh environments during the breeding season. These results stem from information he gathered on three species during ten breeding seasons in the Pacific Northwest, on Red-winged blackbirds during two breeding seasons in Costa Rica, and on three...

A Bird-Finding Guide to Panama is an essential tool for anyone traveling in search of Panama's spectacular birds and natural attractions. With more than 970 species and a growing infrastructure of good roads, eco-lodges, and restaurants, Panama is a premier birding and nature tourism destination in the neotropics. The country's unique geography, small size, and varied habitats make it easy to see a vast diversity of birds within a short time. The isthmus is a crossroads for the hemisphere's birdlife Panama's varied avifauna includes such Central American specialties as the Resplendent...

In Discovering Birds, Paul Lawrence Farber rejects the view that eighteenth-century natural history disappeared with the rise of nineteenth-century biology. In this penetrating case study of the history of ornithology, Farber demonstrates interesting continuities: as natural history evolved into individual sciences (botany, geology, and zoology) and specialties (entomology and ichthyology), the study of birds emerged as a distinct scientific discipline that remained observational and taxonomic. Ornithologists continued to see one of their primary tasks as classification, and they...

This book explores afresh the long-standing interest, and emphasis on, the special' capacities of primates. Some of the recent discoveries of the higher cognitive abilities of other mammals and also birds challenge the concept that primates are special and even the view that the cognitive ability of apes is more advanced than that of nonprimate mammals and birds. It is therefore timely to ask whether primates are, in fact, special and to do so from a broad range of perspectives. Divided into five sections this book deals with topics about higher cognition and how it is manifested in...