I’m very pleased to announce in this first post on my new website, that my popular science book ‘Bird Brain’ has a publication date. It’s going to be published in the UK by Ivy Press on August 4th 2016, and in the US by Princeton University Press on August 30th 2016. I am incredibly excited and can’t wait for you all to read it. It took over a year of writing, and I created all the illustrations in Photoshop, which were turned into Ivy Press style by their fantastic illustrators. I’m going to start posting my original illustrations on this site in the next few weeks.

I’m very proud of how the book’s turned out, and I’m excited to see what you think of it. We think that it’s rather unusual, as it’s heavily illustrated, not just with stunning photographs, but diagrams of avian brains and illustrations of key experiments throughout. We’re also lucky that Frans de Waal was able to write the Forward.

You can pre-order the book on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, as well as other sites and real bookstores. I’ve been very lucky to work with an amazing group of people at Ivy Press to create a book of which I’m extremely proud, and which looks stunning! I hope the cover image above gives you some clue to how great the contents are.

I wrote the book to be of interest to as wide an audience as possible, including those that perhaps haven’t considered the intelligence of birds before. However, it also functions well as a coffee table book to be dipped into and digested in relatively small amounts. The book consists of  seven chapters on brains; memory & space; communication; sociality; tools & problem-solving; self-awareness, mental time travel & social reasoning, with each chapter containing a number of self-contained spreads.

Please keep coming back to this site to receive updates on the progress of the book, posting of images and original illustrations, and some thoughts on bird brains and other things that take my fancy. See you again soon!