IniciGrupsConversesMésTendències
Cerca al lloc
Aquest lloc utilitza galetes per a oferir els nostres serveis, millorar el desenvolupament, per a anàlisis i (si no has iniciat la sessió) per a publicitat. Utilitzant LibraryThing acceptes que has llegit i entès els nostres Termes de servei i política de privacitat. L'ús que facis del lloc i dels seus serveis està subjecte a aquestes polítiques i termes.

Resultats de Google Books

Clica una miniatura per anar a Google Books.

S'està carregant…

Where Song Began

de Tim Low

MembresRessenyesPopularitatValoració mitjanaConverses
1506180,890 (4.07)Cap
An authoritative and entertaining exploration of Australia's distinctive birds and their unheralded role in global evolution Renowned for its gallery of unusual mammals, Australia is also a land of extraordinary birds. But unlike the mammals, the birds of Australia flew beyond the continent's boundaries and around the globe many millions of years ago. This eye-opening book tells the dynamic but little-known story of how Australia provided the world with songbirds and parrots, among other bird groups, why Australian birds wield surprising ecological power, how Australia became a major evolutionary center, and why scientific biases have hindered recognition of these discoveries. From violent, swooping magpies to tool-making cockatoos, Australia's birds are strikingly different from birds of other lands-often more intelligent and aggressive, often larger and longer-lived. Tim Low, a renowned biologist with a rare storytelling gift, here presents the amazing evolutionary history of Australia's birds. The story of the birds, it turns out, is inseparable from the story of the continent itself and also the people who inhabit it.… (més)
S'està carregant…

Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar.

No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra.

Es mostren 1-5 de 6 (següent | mostra-les totes)
Not being Australian, I don't think I am in the core audience for this book. Nonetheless, I found it fascinating. While he dives into the details, especially in the second half of the book, Low always tries to give a wide perspective. I like that he tries to explain why Australian birds are different, the evolutionary reasons. (Of course these speculative explanations could be wrong, but they are still interesting to consider.) I would have preferred to have more anecdotal stories from Low himself about his interactions with birds, or with bird science. He includes a few such stories, but they are very brief and not particularly interesting.

> Twenty million years ago Australia was wetter and largely clad in rainforest. For much of its past it was united with Antarctica by a peninsula of land that gradually narrowed and was finally severed some 45–38 million years ago. … The continent slowly dried as it wandered north, 7–8 centimetres a year, into the dry middle latitudes. … From 100,000 years to about 11,000 years ago it would have been possible to hike 5000 kilometres from northern New Guinea all the way to southern Tasmania.

> One book on the subject expressed the general view that no bird-pollinated flowers exist in Europe, nor in Asia north of the Himalayas. That was proved wrong by a 2005 article, "First Confirmation of a Native Bird-pollinated Plant in Europe," when warblers were seen on rare pea flowers in Spain, but the pool of examples remains ridiculously small. The contrast with Australia could hardly be greater. Many of its best known plants are bird-pollinated: banksias, grevilleas, bottlebrushes, grasstrees, paperbarks, hakeas and hundreds of eucalypts. Birds are not the only visitors of these flowers but often serve as their best pollinators.

> Nectar birds are plentiful in Africa, the Americas and tropical Asia, but the vast majority are tiny hummingbirds and sunbirds. … Australia's biggest honeyeater – the Tasmanian yellow wattlebird – is five times the weight of the largest nectar bird on another continent, the spectacled spiderhunter of South-East Asia, a large sunbird.

> Australia's ample sunshine and depleted soils encourage plants to produce more carbohydrates than they can use. All the sugars produced by photosynthesis cannot be converted into tissues or seeds because the soil nutrients needed as additional ingredients are scarce. The surplus sugar is fed to birds as nectar in return for pollination. Birds can thrive on this sugar because they eat insects as well to provide missing nutrients. Honeyeaters will pursue flies so tiny that more energy is lost chasing them than is gained eating them, but they have bountiful sugar to fund their pursuit of rare phosphorus, zinc, iodine and cobalt. These minerals have become precious because Australia is so flat and geologically stable that there is little new soil created to replace the nutrients leached away by tens of millions of years of rain.

> The large landmasses in the north accumulated so much ice that plants had to relocate to survive. In the Southern Hemisphere, oceans moderated temperatures by carrying warm water south and persistence in situ was often possible. Australia is so infertile that many plants succeed by adapting to certain soils, reducing the value of migration because the soils vary so much from region to region. A strong flowering effort reduces the need to move by assisting genetic turnover in times of change.

> The Sydney region alone has more than twice as many eucalypt species (100-plus) as Britain has total tree species.

> Wind-pollinated trees cannot mingle like this because too much pollen reaches the wrong stigmas. … A large pool of trees can sustain a large community of birds if flowering across a region is staggered to provide continuity. Bird pollination benefits from diverse forests in a way wind pollination does not. … The presence of the honey possum, the world's only non-flying flower mammal, one that depends entirely on pollen for protein, attests to nonstop nectar for millions of years past.

> Parrots may account for the difference in accessibility, since their beak shape means they can't get nectar from tubes unless they tear open and ruin flowers. I suspect that, to limit damage from parrots, Australian flowers evolved readily accessible nectar, and this liberated honeyeaters from the need for specialised bills.

> Honeydew shows up mainly in cool places, perhaps because sugar plays a role as antifreeze in sap. … Cider gums are Australia’s most cold-adapted trees, with sap that thickens into a honey-like syrup you can lick from the tree. In the Northern Hemisphere, maple sap only becomes sweet when it is boiled down to syrup.

> Of the three groups of birds that learn rather than inherit their calls – songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds – the first two count as the most intelligent of birds, some proving better at problem solving than most mammals. … From what we currently know, a capacity for vocal learning has evolved eight times, the other occasions being among humans, elephants, seals, dolphins and whales, and some bats.

> Parrots have a discerning palette, with somewhere between 300 and 400 taste buds, more than chickens (250–350) and many more than pigeons (37–75) and bullfinches (46), though far fewer than humans (9000) and catfish (100 000).

> To conserve scarce nutrients in the highly infertile soils, plants produce long-lasting leaves, protected from herbivores by high levels of fibre and often tainted with aromatic oils and phenolics. These defences are cheap for plants to produce because the key ingredient is carbon fixed during photosynthesis, rather than, as in most toxins, scarce nitrogen extracted from the soil. The oils and lignin in these sclerophyll plants, as they are called, burn readily, resulting in leaves that are often flammable when green. Orians and Milewski stressed that plants are flammable where soils are poor

> Australia has ten times as many pigeon genera as Europe, and twice as many as North and South America combined (they have ten altogether to Australia's twenty).

> Seabird wings, being long and thin for soaring, have reduced value for lift. An albatross on land cannot explode into flight like a startled pigeon; it must leap or lean into turbulence, or lumber along the ground flapping. No albatross or shearwater ever pulled up gracefully in a tree, as their wings have poor braking power and their paddle feet lack a toe for grip. All petrels nest on or under the ground, never up in trees, obliging them to find islands without mammals. … Because its chicks, on their maiden flight, need a long drop to engage their wings, Abbott's booby is the only seabird anywhere to need tall rainforest. ( )
  breic | Sep 14, 2019 |
Superb book about Australia's amazing birdlife. The title refers to the fact that songbirds evolved in Australia and spread throughout the world. Australia also has the most aggressive birdlife in the world, from the magpie that regularly attacks passersby in the rbeeding season to flocks of noisy miners that repel all other birds from their turf, to enormous flocks of parrots that make an unholy row as they seek to dominate their feeding and roosting grounds. Low meticulously explores the origins of Australia's unique birdlife, picking out individual species, many of them unobtrusive rare and hardly known to the public at. There is the sad story of the paradise parrot, the only parrot to go extinct in Australia in modern times, the extremely shy buff-fronted button-quali, which has never been photographed in the wild, amazing seabirds like the albatross than can sleep on the wing and the incredible vocal variety of the lyrebird. A wonderful absorbing book from I which I learnt so much. ( )
  drmaf | Jan 25, 2019 |
BRILLIANT I can't praise it enough. I loved learning about those amazing gorgeous critters that live outside my door. One caveat: Not a fast fun read. It took me way longer than i usually read. It is not for those not comfortable with science as it reads somewhat like a science text.
  newnoz | Aug 6, 2016 |
Thought provoking and at times very depressing reading (use and abuse of animals both historically and currently) this book is a must for anyone interested in birds, natural history, Australia or conservation.
The only thing I would have liked to see in the book is a glossary. As a layperson to the world of birds the overwhelming number of names - common, scientific and families, genera etc - got to be confusing more than once and it would have been great to have a quick reference point. A few times I pulled out my ipad and looked things up so I could keep track. and sometimes I just lost track because I wasn't in a position to search elsewhere while reading. ( )
  SashaM | Apr 20, 2016 |
Australia is justly famous for its weird and wonderful monotremes and marsupials, but here Tim Low argues convincingly that its bird life is even more fascinating and distinctive. I had expected the book to mostly tell the story of Australia as the evolutionary starting place of songbirds, but it's a much more ambitious story, covering basically the whole evolutionary history of birds in Australia. Low takes a careful, scientific approach - clearly acknowledging the numerous uncertainties in the science and outlining the arguments and counter-arguments where theories are contested. It's a wonderful learning experience, both in terms of the over-arching evolutionary-geographical story and in terms of the neat factoids dotted throughout (e.g. in temperate conditions, budgies and zebra finches can live indefinitely without water, relying solely on the tiny amounts of moisture found in seeds). ( )
  mjlivi | Feb 2, 2016 |
Es mostren 1-5 de 6 (següent | mostra-les totes)
Sense ressenyes | afegeix-hi una ressenya
Has d'iniciar sessió per poder modificar les dades del coneixement compartit.
Si et cal més ajuda, mira la pàgina d'ajuda del coneixement compartit.
Títol normalitzat
Títol original
Títols alternatius
Data original de publicació
Gent/Personatges
Llocs importants
Esdeveniments importants
Pel·lícules relacionades
Epígraf
Dedicatòria
Primeres paraules
Citacions
Darreres paraules
Nota de desambiguació
Editor de l'editorial
Creadors de notes promocionals a la coberta
Llengua original
CDD/SMD canònics
LCC canònic

Referències a aquesta obra en fonts externes.

Wikipedia en anglès (1)

An authoritative and entertaining exploration of Australia's distinctive birds and their unheralded role in global evolution Renowned for its gallery of unusual mammals, Australia is also a land of extraordinary birds. But unlike the mammals, the birds of Australia flew beyond the continent's boundaries and around the globe many millions of years ago. This eye-opening book tells the dynamic but little-known story of how Australia provided the world with songbirds and parrots, among other bird groups, why Australian birds wield surprising ecological power, how Australia became a major evolutionary center, and why scientific biases have hindered recognition of these discoveries. From violent, swooping magpies to tool-making cockatoos, Australia's birds are strikingly different from birds of other lands-often more intelligent and aggressive, often larger and longer-lived. Tim Low, a renowned biologist with a rare storytelling gift, here presents the amazing evolutionary history of Australia's birds. The story of the birds, it turns out, is inseparable from the story of the continent itself and also the people who inhabit it.

No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca.

Descripció del llibre
Sumari haiku

Debats actuals

Cap

Cobertes populars

Dreceres

Valoració

Mitjana: (4.07)
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3 2
3.5
4 9
4.5
5 3

Ets tu?

Fes-te Autor del LibraryThing.

 

Quant a | Contacte | LibraryThing.com | Privadesa/Condicions | Ajuda/PMF | Blog | Botiga | APIs | TinyCat | Biblioteques llegades | Crítics Matiners | Coneixement comú | 203,201,487 llibres! | Barra superior: Sempre visible