Roger F. Pasquier's Birds at Rest: The Behavior and Ecology of Avian Sleep is a necessary addition to more common types of references and guides regarding birds and their behavior. Despite having shelves full of them and reading up on various things about bird behavior, there is very little out there like this book that details such a massive part of their lives- resting, roosting, sleeping, and all of the related behaviors that come with that.
The information in this book is exhaustive in a good way. While there was more captive animal research than I prefer to read about, that was to be expected going into this book and is not a mark against it. The author is not in charge of the ethics of those research studies. There is a ton of informative and more ethical field research, much of which I had never encountered anything close to before. I learned a lot of different things about species that I tend to focus my interest on, as well as many things about species I've never even heard of. I also learned about field research methods that were quite interesting. I had no idea there were mobile EEG methods where one could study the sleep of chimney swifts in flight for instance. I found a lot of this extremely fascinating.
The book also covers what human intervention into the environment has done to the abilities referred to roost safely, communicate and breed effectively, and generally exist in the world. This was unsurprisingly the saddest part of the book. For instance I knew that our light pollution had affected migration and bird behavior for some time. I didn't realize, even though perhaps I should have, that it also damages their ability to breed successfully. A critical factor for consideration regarding the decline in bird populations is simply artificial light. Our introduction of non-native species has caused extinction and decline in large numbers. Our destruction of habitat causes birds to compete more than they would normally, resulting in further aggression and conflict. This was another thing that is unsurprising, but written in a way that I had not quite thought about it before. Humans tend to write about birds as fighting over territory and competing through various means as if it is a given. But we don't tend to write enough about how the sheer amount of competition is so directly affected by our destruction of their habitats for any number of reasons. I wonder how different aggression levels were before we decimated most of the planet.
I will admit that I did find this book a bit dry at times. It very much reads cover to cover like a reference guide without photography. There are illustrations that I found quite charming and whimsical. There's almost a children's book quality to some of them which did break things up a bit. But, there weren't enough of them for my tastes when it comes to reading a book straight through like this. At the same time, it is very well organized such that one could treat it exactly like a guide. Each chapter is well labeled and constructed and contains a detailed summary at the end. So, if you find yourself overwhelmed by reading the catalogue of facts about each and every bird species, you could successfully read the summary of each chapter and then go through to seek out the more specific information that you need. Strangely though, there was no summary at the end of the book. It just ended abruptly after that last section on human influence. So, perhaps I went into this book expecting something different, but it is likely best to treat it as a reference guide.
One may retain more information by hopping around the book rather than reading it cover to cover. Nonetheless it's full of page flags and I'll definitely be coming back to it time and again. I'm grateful to have a volume on my shelf containing such important information that is often so lacking and scholarship about the avian world.
This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.
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