Читать книгу Bird Senses - Graham R. Martin - Страница 16

This book has an ambitious aim. It is to encourage in readers a full and detailed entry into the world of birds, to appreciate the world from their perspective, not ours. We have many different way of contemplating birds’ worlds. For example, we may be observers of spectacle, admirers of evolutionary adaptations, or tickers-off of the diversity of species. All of these are exciting and enjoyable ways of appreciating birds. But there is much more to birds if we can enter their worlds by learning about their senses and thereby understanding the many ways that birds use information to guide their actions in different environments. In short, the aim of this book is to appreciate the worlds of birds through the information that their senses provide. Hopefully this book will make you feel that you can be a participant in the challenges that face different bird species as they conduct their special behaviours in particular environments.

Reflect a while on your favourite species, or on a species that particularly intrigues you. How can you piece together an understanding of their world? What do you need to know about? These birds may be living right alongside you, sharing the same environment, but in truth you and they live in different worlds, each species extracting a unique suite of information about that environment.

Through their eyes and ears, through their senses of touch, taste, and smell, and through magnetoreception, each species gains different information, so much so that each species is tuned into a different world. Knowing that this is the case can be both challenging and exhilarating for understanding the world in which we personally live. By reflecting upon the sensory challenges and their evolved solutions in other species, we become a little more aware of what it means to be human. We may also become a little more humble about our place in the world when we realise that what we think of as reality is just one of many realities, each reality defined by a different species, and the information provided by their suites of senses (Figure 1.5).

FIGURE 1.5 A Golden Eagle and a human in the same place and at the same time, but what each knows of that situation is quite different. Each is living in a different world bounded by their different senses. Both worlds, however, are equally real and valid. (Photo by Simon Baxter.)