ON THE WING

After several years of marriage, Rachel Dickinson’s husband Tim revealed that in his youth he had been a falconer. So begins the odyssey recounted in Falconer On The Edge (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24). With dry wit, a fairly resigned attitude and her game-face on, Rachel traces the story of the most famous contemporary falconer of all, Steve Chindgren. His pursuit of the perfect bird led him all over the American West. Dickinson masterfully blends the romance of falconry with an unerring insight into the more unsettling sides of obsession. Both her prose and her story recall John Krakauer’s Into the Wild as we follow Chindgren’s path through self-discovery and personal challenge. Anne Armstrong

A bee-eater consumes some 200 bees a day to survive. The tailorbird uses its beak and spider webs to sew leaves together for its nest. In owls, one ear is higher and bigger than the other to sharpen hearing. Collectively, a bird’s feathers weigh more than all its bones. And in the next few decades, one of every nine species of bird may go extinct. These are just some of the facts Colin Tudge has gathered in his capacious, enthusiastic study, The Bird (Crown, $30). He shows how birds nest and mate and he explains the difference between calls and songs. He includes lessons in taxonomy and surveys the 31 orders into which the world’s 10,500 species of birds are organized. He explains what little we understand about migration, and describes scientific debates over the relationship between birds and dinosaurs and how birds think. He lays out the arguments for seeing birds in a spirit of Darwinian competitiveness as opposed to one of mutually beneficial cooperation. As he did in The Tree, Tudge assembles a huge amount of information into a compelling narrative. Laurie Greer