Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds [Hardcover]

Scott Weidensaul (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 1999

The magnificent story of the natural world's most epic journeys.

At whatever moment you read these words, there are birds aloft in the skies of the Western Hemisphere, migrating. If it is spring or fall, the great pivot points of the year, then the continents are swarming with hundreds of millions of traveling birds-a flood so great that even the most ignorant or unobservant notice the skeins of geese and the flocks of robins.

Bird migration is the one truly unifying natural phenomenon in the world, stitching the continents together in a way that even the great weather systems, which roar out from the poles but fizzle at the equator, fail to do. Scott Weidensaul follows the awesome kettles of hawks over the Mexican coastal plains, the bar-tailed godwits that hitchhike on gale winds 6,000 miles nonstop across the Pacific from Alaska to New Zealand, and the myriad songbirds whose numbers have dwindled so dramatically in recent decades. Migration paths form an elaborate global web that shows serious signs of fraying, and Weidensaul delves into the tragedies of habitat degradation and deforestation with an urgency that brings to life the vast problems these miraculous migrants now face.

A magisterial book, Living on the Wind vivifies what may be the most compelling drama of the natural world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Did you know that neither temperature nor hunger sparks bird migration? That many species migrate at night? That some birds migrate more than 5,000 miles in a single, uninterrupted flight? "We are such stodgy, rooted creatures," observes the author of this fascinating book. "To think of crossing thousands of miles under our own power is as incomprehensible as jumping the moon. Yet even the tiniest of birds perform such miracles."

For anyone curious about the lives of migratory birds (and, incidentally, those of bird-obsessed humans), this book is a great nest of information. The author has traveled all over the world banding and observing birds and talking to the experts--amateur birders and ornithologists who have made many of the important discoveries about bird biology. From Alaska to Lake Erie to the limestone forests of Jamaica, Weidensaul reaches not only for the scientific particulars but for the universal stories and humanizing, descriptive turns of phrase that keep this book from bogging down in statistics and jargon. By book's end the reader is unable to resist the heart of this compelling story, a plea for the conservation of habitat to keep these miraculous creatures on--or at least circling--the earth. --Maria Dolan

From Scientific American

"At whatever moment you read these words, day or night, there are birds aloft in the skies of the Western Hemisphere, migrating." Thus Weidensaul begins his compelling tale, adding shortly afterward what must be a widely shared thought: "That such delicate creatures undertake these epic journeys defies belief." With helpful supporting maps, he describes the migrating habits of many bird species and considers the intriguing question of how they do it. At the end, he focuses on a single bird--a redstart that he hears and sees singing while he sits alongside a stream in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. "What I cannot see, no matter how closely I look, is what drives this small creature, barely heavier than air, to make the journeys that it must make... Its secrets are locked in that tiny packet of brain and muscle and instinct, a few feet away but separated from me by an immense, uncrossable distance. It knows, and I do not."

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press; 1St Edition edition (April 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865475431
• ISBN-13: 978-0865475434
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #632,042 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you enjoy birds or natural science, read this great book!, April 24, 2000

By 

Richard E. Hegner (Columbia, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (Hardcover)

I have been a birdwatcher for 39 years, and rarely have I encountered a book that I enjoyed as much as this. Unlike another reviewer, I learned a great deal about migration from reading this book--though, truth to tell, the book is as much about population dynamics among Western Hemisphere birds as it is about migration. One of the particular insights I gained from the book is a better realization of the somewhat parochial viewpoint many of us birdwatchers in North America take, considering migrants who spend only a brief part of the year breeding here to be "our birds," when they spend most of their lives either in Latin America or migrating between the two continents. The author has an unusually captivating writing style and most of the book was hard for me to put down; he reminds me of some of the best nature writers I have encountered--Hal Borland, John Burroughs, Loren Eiseley, Pete Dunn, and Thoreau. One of the book's particular strengths is its focus on certain critical locales as well as individual species; the general observations have much more meaning because of these case examples. While the book is most likely to be appreciated best by veteran birdwatchers, I do feel that almost anyone with a natural history bent can find some enjoyment in it. Among the few shortcomings of the book are the lack of illustrations for those unfamiliar with the individual species--something that can be remedied by referring to a field guide as one reads it--as well as the paucity of really good maps. (There are a few scattered maps, but the text makes repeated reference to sites in the Western Hemisphere--especially outside the U.S. and Canada--about whose location I had no idea. Because many of them are obscure places, a general purpose atlas is unlikely to be much help.) As a final strength of the book, I should point out its beautiful dust jacket, with embossed bird silhouettes atop a topographical map of the hemisphere, as well as the handsome typesetting job. In other words, it is a book to be appreciated for more than just its content.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving, well-informed discussion of migration in the '90s., August 31, 1999

By 

Charlotte Seidenberg (charlotte.seidenberg@w... (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (Hardcover)

This review by Charlotte Seidenberg was published Sunday, May 9, 1999 in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

''So tell me, what is a blackburnian warbler worth, orange and ebony like a jungle tiger?'' Scott Weidensaul asks in ''Living on the Wind: Across the Globe with Migratory Birds." "In the end such measures are pointless," he answers. "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." Though some gloomy scientists predict the end of migrations in our lifetime, Weidensaul says "there's no future in pessimism. Here, at the last possible moment, we have awakened to what we stand to lose -- poised on the brink, but still, perhaps, with time to draw away from the edge." This immensely readable exploration of bird migration by a prolific nature writer and licensed bird bander shows us just what we stand to lose. It's science that reads like adventure with well-drawn characters in vividly described settings. It's about birds and nature, but also about people and the ways they interact with the natural world. It's a cliffhanger with the ending as yet unwritten. The author traveled from one end of the Western Hemisphere to the other pursuing the mysteries of migration: from the western Alaskan breeding grounds of millions of shorebirds with names such as tattler and dunlin and godwit to the Argentine pampas, wintering grounds of the Swainson's hawk, "a bird made of light and shadow, at home in the pale blue bowl of the prairie sky." In Vera Cruz, Mexico, he watched thousands of migratory hawks, kites, and vultures "move across the landscape by sliding from thermal to thermal, forming enormous kettles that swirl and seethe with wheeling birds." He visited the Platte River in Nebraska, where half a million sandhill cranes with six-foot wingspans rest on their way to the tundra, and experienced an avian "fallout" on the Gulf Coast, where "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." People in pursuit Weidensaul's human subjects are equally vivid, ranging from passionate goose hunters to birders "with thousand dollar binoculars and field guides worn in holster-like pouches riding low on their hips." He introduces a backyard birder who fed a ton and a half of food to 150 grosbeaks in his yard one winter and "citizen scientists" who collaborate on research projects, doing field work in their backyards and reporting via the Internet. Elucidating the scientific process for the layman, he makes fieldwork seem like adventure, describing ornithologists who signed onto Norwegian freighters to prove trans-Gulf migration, who rigged hawks with radio transmitters to track them to their wintering grounds, who used radar to study migration and gathered the "first hard, quantifiable evidence that a decline had indeed taken place." Other scientists studied warblers wintering in Jamaica and the same species summering in New Hampshire, and "uncovered an army of dangers that we, in our heedless manipulation of the natural world, are making worse." Scientists now recognize a host of problems for migratory birds -- from habitat loss to predation by domestic cats -- and are searching for solutions. Will those solutions come too late? Before dawn in late spring, Weidensaul travels to an eastern forest, where male wood thrushes sing "their clear notes scrolling up and down like improvisations, looping back on themselves, then ringing out in lucent peals. When the thrush stops, it feels as though the forest is holding its breath." What if the thrush stopped forever? After reading "Living on the Wind," you'll likely agree the thought is unacceptable.

Living on the Wind: Across the Globe With Migratory Birds

Review: A beautifully written, well-informed and moving discussion of migratory birds and the problems affecting migration in the '90s. Especially entertaining are the author's portraits of people who are passionate about birds. © Copyright 1999 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tales of migration that read like a Crichton novel..., June 5, 2001

By 

B. Bloodworth "Blood" (SLC, UT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (Hardcover)

This is absolutely one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. Not only backyard birding enthusiasts, but anyone who has ever had even a passing interest in birds will love this book. Scott writes about birds in an understanding yet scientific manner that lends itself to wonderful readability while providing vast amounts of information. Beginning in Alaska, moving down the hemisphere to the pampas of Argentina, and back again, he takes the reader on a amazing journey that literally follows the paths taken by millions of birds each year. He combines personal field experiences with well assembled accounts of scientific research and ornithological history to paint a vivid picture of the swirling patterns of avian movement across the globe. If you have ever looked twice at a bird passing overhead, I highly reccomend picking up this valuable addition to any naturalist's library.