I loved this book – the subject matter has always fascinated me, and the writing was literary and in some places almost lyrical. And I learned a lot, because this book is about a lot more than just geese flying in the familiar “V” formation.

First things first: migration isn’t so much about bad weather as it is food. Given enough food, a bird can withstand extremely harsh winter conditions – most famously, Emperor penguins nest on ice during the Antarctic winter. Black-capped chickadees are non-migratory and spend their winters in Canada and northern New England, but their diet is seed-based and they can find enough to eat to sustain a blazing metabolic furnace – their average body temperature is 104 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, some tropical bird species such as parrots will migrate within the tropics to follow the flowering or fruiting seasons of the plants they depend on for food. Second, migration is a lot more complicated than the north-to-south-and-back-again that we usually associate with birds. Some species migrate along an east-west axis – the harlequin duck nests in the Rockies but migrates west to the Pacific coast and common diving ducks nest in Utah but migrate east to the Atlantic coast. Other species migrate vertically, switching between lower altitudes in the winter and higher altitudes in the summer, and a few species counterintuitively reverse this pattern. Different subpopulations of the same species may also use dramatically different migration routes.

Migratory birds connect the world in a way very few other things do, and that applies both geographically and politically. The arctic tern may forge the most spectacular geographic link of all – every year they migrate from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again. When the Arctic summer days are long, the terns have plenty of light to hunt fish, but as the Arctic winter approaches and the days grow shorter, they embark on a journey to Antarctica, arriving just in time to take advantage of the long summer days there. During the Antarctic fall, they leave for the Arctic again and arrive in time for its long summer days. An average Arctic tern can easily clock 22,000 miles a year. Another example is the bar-tailed godwit, which nests in Alaska but winters in New Zealand. To prepare for its 6,800-mile nonstop flight, a bar-tailed godwit will boost its fat reserves to 55 percent of its body weight, and then its kidneys, liver, and gut will all shrink to a fraction of their normal size, with the combined effect of maximizing its fuel supply while minimizing its weight. A blackpoll warbler is five and a half inches long and weighs half an ounce, but small size is no obstacle – they nest in western Alaska and winter in the western Amazon, giving them the longest migration of any North American songbird. Most incredibly, they don’t even take the most direct route; instead, they travel east across Canada, and then go south. There are two different routes south, but the most remarkable involves flying over the open ocean to catch the northwesterly winds that will help propel them to Bermuda, and from Bermuda they can pick up the subtropical trades to reach South America. That overwater trip normally lasts from forty to fifty hours nonstop and covers two thousand miles. Like other migratory birds, it relies on its fat reserves for fuel, and gets the equivalent of 720,000 mpg.

Politically, one of the first federal environmental laws (enacted in 1918) was enacted specifically to protect migrating birds – the signatories to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act now include the United States, Canada, Mexico, Russia, and Japan. The desire to save as many migratory bird species as possible has also spawned unprecedented informal conservation efforts – virtually every country in North America, Central America, and South America has signed on to massive conservation efforts including research, education, and habitat protection. An example is the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network, which has identified and sometimes prompted the conservation of four million acres of wetlands between Argentina and Alaska which thirty million migratory shorebirds depend on for survival.

I found the writing style beautiful and the book just sang to me in general. Some parts read like they would be equally at home in a novel. The opening sentence for one chapter read, “In winter, the salt marsh hisses. The wind, which is rarely still on the wide, open flats along the Delmarva Peninsula, draws its fingers through the dried tips of the cordgrass, tall and thick enough to hide a man; the sound it makes is sibilant and empty, an endless sigh.” (page 222). Another part described the author’s experience during one birdwatching trip: “Over and over again, small explosions of birds would materialize out of the sky, whirring from on high, beyond the limit of vision and into the trees like bolts, until the woods were stuffed to overflowing with them.” (page 251). A paragraph describing man-made ecological havoc ended with, “This was habitat hell, an impoverished, completely alien ecosystem, imposed on the land like some organic form of demonic possession.” (page 154).

There was also a fabulous section that illustrated the ecological importance of cheniers by describing migration from the point of view of a small songbird:

“Let’s say you’re a bird, a little bitty Tennessee warbler that weighs as much as four pennies. You left Celestun, Yucatan, at dark the previous day, and ever since you’ve been flapping without rest, twenty beats a second for eighteen hours. At first you had a tailwind from the south, but in the middle of the night you encountered a squall line, with battering rain that forced you lower and lower toward the deadly sea. You pushed through that with scant feet to spare, salt spray from the whitecaps stinging your eyes, but when the rain ceased the wind did not, hammering you in the face, cold and gusty as you stubbornly regained altitude. The little deposits of fat beneath your skin – pale, yellowish mounds under your wings and in the hollow of your neck, which you accumulated by eating uncounted small tropical insects, are nearly gone. Soon your body will start catabolizing muscle tissue, a desperate act of self-cannibalism with only one purpose, to get you across the six hundred miles of fatal water.

Finally, from your vantage point at 4,000 feet, you can see a dark rim on the horizon, like a lid on the ocean. Land. Are you overjoyed, relieved, delighted? If you are, the celebration is premature; over the next half hour, as you draw closer and closer, you see nothing but flat, empty marsh beyond the breakers. That’s fine if you’re a grebe or gallinule, but you’re a forest bird and you need woods – trees for cover and tree-dwelling bugs for food. That’s where the cheniers come in.” (page 268).

This stuck with me long after I had turned the page (and even the chapter), and I kept turning back to it. It also made me think I might like to read a novel written from the point of view of a bird.
The book closed with a discussion of human attitudes toward nature and conservation, and this paragraph stood out:

“So tell me, what is a blackburnian warbler worth, orange and ebony like a jungle tiger? A pair of scissor-tailed flycatchers? A flock of orioles? I suppose that depends on how you measure such things. We can weigh the tangibles and the intangibles, retail sales and spiritual renewal, tourist dollars and checkmarks on a life list. But in the end such measures are pointless; we should probably just stand aside and watch with quiet humility as another generation of travelers flies north, compelled by a priceless bravery buried deep in their genes.” (pages 272-273).

And it ended on a note of hope: “So my optimism isn’t rooted in logic. It is a fragile emotion, much bruised by reality – a slender slip of a thing, but still standing. Besides, there’s no future in pessimism.” (page 370).

Highly recommended.
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Birds. Lots of birds. More birds than a non-birder can imagine. Very well written, exhaustively researched. And way more than I ever wanted to know about migratory birds. A truly wonderful book for birders, and a pretty good, though awfully thorough one for the curious. ( )

A celebration of migration and explanation of the process and stresses involved. Divided into three sections: fall migration, wintering grounds, spring mingration, the author looks at important places in each season. Vanishing habitat in each season is a big concern. There is local interest in discussions of snow geese and cirulian warblers. I found discriptions of places I've been, Long Point,Ont, and places I'm planning to go, Texas, parrticularly interesting. ( )