Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds was a surprise bestseller – a peppy survey of the science of bird intelligence rivalled only by Tim Birkhead’s masterful Bird Sense in its ability to overthrow our misconceptions about the complexity and ingenuity of bird brains. Now Ackerman, one of the most acclaimed science writers in the US, is back with another book about birds, one that delves deeper into the wonders and peculiarities of the avian world, seeking to explode the conventional idea that, as the opening of the book puts it, “there is the bird way, and there is the mammal way”. This book is a celebration of the dizzying variety of bird life and behaviour, one that will enthral birders and non-birders alike.

The recent vogue for books about birds – started by Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk and continued by Birkhead as well as in memorable titles by Adam Nicolson, Tim Dee and Ackerman herself – seems to have been mirrored by an avian turn in scientific research. Despite there being only four years between The Bird Way and its predecessor, it feels like a revolution has taken place in our understanding of birds in that time. The science here is hard, compelling and presented in Ackerman’s engaging and jargon-free prose, and on every page there is evidence to support the book’s thesis: that to speak of birds en masse is to make a category error, one that blinds us to the extraordinary variance in behaviour, appearance and even biology in these creatures we attempt to trap under the same ontological net. As American naturalist EO Wilson said: “Once you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.”

The book is arranged according to different aspects of bird behaviour. It begins with birdsong, moving from the dawn chorus to alarm calls to mimicry; then there’s a series of chapters on “work” – how birds go about providing for themselves and their offspring. After this comes “play”, perhaps the most remarkable section in the book, where Ackerman looks at “one of the most playful animals on the planet”, the raven, in a way that means you’ll never be able to read Edgar Allan Poe again without laughing.

Like Birkhead, Ackerman gets into a steamy fluster over the sex lives of birds in her sections on “love”, describing in intimate detail the “billing of Atlantic puffins, a gentle rubbing together of beaks in anticipation of sex”. She gives us “the sweet-seeming presentation of flower petals by male superb fairy-wrens” and the “tender mutual attentions of Fischer’s lovebirds”. She’s careful not to sentimentalise or anthropomorphise, though, noting that groups of mallard drakes will “force themselves on an unwilling female, sometimes attacking with such force and in such numbers that they kill her in the process”. We learn that while most birds have no penis, and many only copulate for a second or two in a “cloacal kiss”, 3% of living bird species (many of them waterfowl) retain the phallus found in their reptilian ancestors. Arabian babblers appear so ashamed of the sexual act that mating birds take elaborate pains to conceal the act from their fellow flock members.

Ackerman’s life appears to be a continent-hopping succession of astonishing encounters with birds, and there’s something powerful in a book that never feels tied to any one place, moving easily from the cave-dwelling oilbirds of north-eastern Venezuela to the keas of New Zealand to the honeyguides of Mozambique. The chain that links these birds is Ackerman’s deep interest in their behaviour and the way it adheres to the thesis of her book. It’s clear that there’s a virtuous circle at work in the scientific study of birds, so that the more we learn about them, the more we recognise the oversimplification and errors of our previous assumptions, the strange and remarkable otherness of life seen through a bird’s eye view. The Bird Way crystallises and threads together these revelations into a book full of wonders large and small.

•  The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent and Eat by Jennifer Ackerman is published by Corsair (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15