WMRA’s October 2023 Books & Brews featured Jennifer Ackerman discussing her books, What an Owl Knows, The Bird Way, and The Genius of Birds, at Seven Arrows Brewing in Waynesboro.
Note - At the author's request, we did not record the presentation, this video is the Q&A portion of the event.
Signed copies of her books are available online at Stone Soup Books.
WMRA's Books & Brews is made possible thanks to our series sponsor, Gaines Group Architects. The Gaines Group has offices in Charlottesville and Harrisonburg.
About the Books
What an Owl Knows is an exciting exploration of the new science of owls and an investigation into why these remarkable and mysterious birds exert such a hold on the human imagination. This book tells the extraordinary story of how we’ve come to understand owls, their biology, brains, and behavior, and explores many of the surprising new scientific discoveries: how owls talk to one another, how they ‘see’ sound, how they court their mates in wild and outlandish ways and fiercely protect their nests, how they migrate huge distances and survive the radically changing conditions of our planet.
The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think upends the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. Scientists are now discovering the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own–deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also, ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play.
The Genius of Birds - For decades, people have written off birds as largely witless, driven solely by instinct, and their brains as primitive, capable of only the simplest mental processes. But it is not so. In recent years, science has discovered that birds are much, much more intelligent than we ever supposed. Ravens, crows, jays, even hummingbirds do things that are just plain smart—and funny and sneaky and deceitful.
About Jennifer Ackerman
Jennifer Ackerman is an award-winning science writer and speaker, and a New York Times bestselling author, and has been writing about science, nature, and health for more than three decades. Her work aims to explain and interpret science for a lay audience and to explore the riddles of the natural world, blending scientific knowledge with strong storytelling. She has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a Silver Medal Award for Nature Writing from the International Regional Magazine Association, and fellowships at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College (now the Radcliffe Institute), Brown College at the University of Virginia, and the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University.