From the New York Times bestselling author of What an Owl Knows, The Genius of Birds, and The Bird Way, here is the first, groundbreaking investigation about how female birds live.

Recent studies about female birds upend everything we thought we knew about birds. Female Northern Cardinals learn their songs three times faster than males do. Female House Wrens can be even more aggressive than their male counterparts. Female birds in general also often have entirely different migratory patterns and are quicker to adapt to climate change.

Jennifer Ackerman grew up with the conventional wisdom found in field guides and bird books. According to them, females were drab and passive. They didn’t sing. They were good mothers, sitting faithfully on their eggs, tending and feeding their young. But it turns out that nothing could be further from the truth. Female birds are both more like males than we thought, and less like them, with radically different ways of living and surviving than their male counterparts.

Why have we gotten things so wrong? It is important that we find out, for, as Ackerman writes, ‘conservation planning has long been aimed at protecting male-dominated habitats’, and some female birds have lost almost twice as much territory as males over the past few decades.

Bird lovers will receive no better gift than this extraordinary chance to fly higher and further than was ever possible before, to see all birds, and then to save them, too.