The intelligence of some birds continues to startle scientists.

The extremes of animal behavior can be a source of endless astonish-ment. But “Gifts of the Crow,” by John N. Marzluff and Tony Angell, includes a description of one behav-ior that even Aesop never imagined.

“On Kinkazan Island in northern Japan,” the authors write, “jungle crows pick up deer feces — dry pellets of dung — and deftly wedge them in the deer’s ears.”

I checked the notes at the back of the book, and this account comes from another book, written in Japa-nese. So I can’t give any more infor-mation on this astonishing claim, other than to say that Dr. Marzluff, of the University of Washington, and Mr. Angell, an artist and ob-server of birds, think that the crows do it in the spirit of fun.

Deer droppings are only one of the crows’ gifts. The authors’ real focus is on the way that crows can give us “the ephemeral and pro-found connection to nature that many people crave.” To that end, they make some surprising asser-tions.

Many of the behaviors they de-scribe — crows drinking beer and coffee, whistling and calling dogs, and presenting gifts to people who feed them — are based on personal testimony.

But the book is also full of clear and detailed accounts of scientific research, with descriptions of the structure of the crow brain .

“Language discovery in a wild animal will not be surprising,” the authors write. “As we scientists become more sophisticated in matching the response of animals to nuances in their vocalizations, we may discover language in cogni-tive birds and mammals that rivals our own.”

I’m going to disagree: the discov-ery of language rivaling our own in wild animals would be a huge scien-tific surprise.

Another book, “Bird Sense,” sticks close to hard science in tack-ling the subject of its subtitle, “What It’s Like to Be a Bird,” but Tim R. Birkhead, of the University of Shef-field in England, has his share of startling statements as well. For ex-ample: “If you put your ear over an earthworm’s burrow you can some-times hear the worm’s tiny bristles rustling against the sides.”

Dr. Birkhead writes about it in connection with studies showing that robins can find worms with their sense of hearing.

He has many intriguing findings about the many senses of birds, in-cluding their magnetic sense . They can fly with one eye closed and half of their brain asleep and still navigate .

He acknowledges that in the end science cannot actually say what it’s like to be a bird. But the attempt to get at what a bird sees, hears, feels and thinks is more than worth the effort.

Both books together are remark-able in their celebration of birds, not least because neither of them gives much consideration to the one trait of birds that, more than any other, captivates human beings in the first place.

They can fly.