What is it like to be a swift, flying at over one hundred kilometres an hour? Or a kiwi, plodding flightlessly among the humid undergrowth in the pitch dark of a New Zealand night? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise? Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other. Our affinity for birds is often said to be the result of shared senses - vision and hearing - but how exactly do their senses compare with our own? And what about a birds' sense of taste, or smell, or touch or the ability to detect the earth's magnetic field? Or the extraordinary ability of desert birds to detect rain hundreds of kilometres away - how do they do it? Bird Sense is based on a conviction that we have consistently underestimated what goes on in a bird's head. Our understanding of bird behaviour is simultaneously informed and constrained by the way we watch and study them. By drawing attention to the way these frameworks both facilitate and inhibit discovery, it identifies ways we can escape from them to seek new horizons in bird behaviour. There has never been a popular book about the senses of birds. No one has previously looked at how birds interpret the world or the way the behaviour of birds is shaped by their senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of observation and an understanding of birds and their behaviour that is firmly grounded in science.

蒂姆·伯剋黑德是英國謝菲爾德大學動物行為學和科學史專業教授，英國皇傢學會會員。在研究生涯中，他曾前往世界各地去瞭解鳥類的生活。伯剋黑德曾經為《獨立報》、《新科學傢》和BBC《野生動物》雜誌撰寫文章。《鳥類的智慧》（The Wisdom of Bird）曾被英國鳥類學基金會和《英國鳥類》雜誌（British Birds）評為“年度最佳鳥類圖書”（2009年）。他最新齣版的作品包括《鳥類的智慧：插圖鳥類學史》（Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology，2008年）、與另外兩位作者閤著的《一萬種鳥：達爾文以來的鳥類學》（Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin, 2011）以及《最完美的事物：鳥蛋內外》（Most Perfect Thing: the Inside (and Outside) of a Bird's Egg, 2016）等書。