How do bats catch insects in the dark? How do bees learn which flowers to visit? How do food-storing birds remember where their hoards are? Questions like these are addressed by neuro-ethology, the branch of behavioral neuroscience concerned with analyzing the neural bases of naturally occurring behaviors.

Each of the thirteen chapters gives an up-to-date overview of a particular author's research and places it within the broader context of issues about animal perception and cognition. The book as a whole exemplifies how studying species and their particular specializations can inform general issues in psychology, ethology and neuroscience.