Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites [Hardcover]

Susan Cerulean (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2005

“My memory is etched with a clear image of how that bird swung into view and hung over me, suspended like an angel, so starkly black and white, with its wide-scissored split of a tail.”

It took just one sighting of a swallow-tailed kite to dispatch Susan Cerulean on a pilgrimage through its fragmented and ever-shrinking habitats. In Tracking Desire, Cerulean immerses us in the natural history and biology of Elanoides forficatus. At the same time, she sifts through her past--as a child, student, biologist, parent, and activist--to muse on a lifelong absorption with nature.

Once at home throughout much of the eastern United States, the swallow-tailed kite is now seldom seen. With ornithologist Ken Meyer, and then on her own, Cerulean roams the kite’s much-reduced homelands, gaining knowledge about the bird and the grave threats to its breeding grounds and migration patterns. Her quest takes her to the muddy banks of the Mississippi, to an enormous and vulnerable roost on corporate ranchlands in southwest Florida, and to the remnant pinelands of Everglades National Park.

In seeking the bird, Cerulean comes to question her own place in our consumerist society. “My journeys after kites have led me to understand that the power of our longings is placing the integrity of life on our tender emerald planet so greatly at risk,” she writes. “What are the fractured places in our hearts and minds and spirits that have allowed us to stand by and watch, and even to participate in, the destruction of so much of life?”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Environmentalist literature often focuses on some charismatic species as an emblem of threatened nature, but seldom with the infatuation hinted at in this title. Writer and conservationist Cerulean (Florida Wildlife Viewing Guide) has spent years researching the graceful raptor and offers a rundown of its diet, mating habits and epic migratory itinerary while deploring the destruction of its habitat by agribusiness and sprawl. But the book owes less to ecology than it does to older romantic conceptions of nature as a mirror of the writer's soul. The bird thus prompts Cerulean's musings on her childhood memories, her psychotherapeutic history, her "hunger for intimacy" and her guilt over her and her forebears' environmental sins, and it becomes a living totem through which she returns to an authentic religion of nature worship after the abstractions of Christianity. Cerulean veers close to out-and-out fetishism, rhapsodizing "the wild desire that strained my body toward that awesome bird" and left her "ready to explode with a primitive, physical longing" that "felt like coupling, like making the baby." Overshadowed by its symbolic role as spiritual mentor or ecstatic trigger, the reality and particularism of the bird itself recedes. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Swallow-tailed kites are beautiful, scissor-tailed raptors, whose flight is so buoyant and effortless that they resemble the paper kites for which they are named. Once found from Minnesota to Texas, and Maine to Florida, their numbers declined alarmingly with the arrival of European settlers and their concurrent altering of the natural landscape. Cerulean's first sighting of a kite almost caused her to overturn her canoe, and she knew she had just encountered something essential that connected her to the wilderness. In a lovely series of essays, Cerulean explores the hunger for intimacy, the unnameable longing, that can cause the connection with nature that she found with the kite but can also cause the destruction of the very thing one desires. As she writes of working with field biologists as they study the kites, and of the natural history of kites, she weaves reminiscences of her past, of how she became fascinated with nature, and of her personal evolution. This lyrical book belongs in all libraries where readers demand environmental writing. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (March 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820326976
• ISBN-13: 978-0820326979
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,274,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Must appreciate bird books, September 25, 2010

By 

Lark - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-Tailed Kites (Paperback)

I was assigned to read this book for a class. Over the years I have read many books for classes and for presentations. This book, while inspired, takes a certain reader to appreciate. This book has a specific audience in mind. If you fall into that audience of bird watchers and naturalists, you will truly find a wonderful book. However, if you are only slightly interested in the natural wildlife of Florida, this book may keep you from opening another for a long time.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars High-flying tales, December 6, 2005

By 

FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites (Hardcover)

The book, 'Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-tailed Kites', is a wonderful story of coming to awareness both of the natural world and its beauty as well as a personal journey of awakening to the world around us.

The author, Susan Cerulean, has a wonderful way with words - she is very imaginative in her descriptions. For example, she describes the kites, the bird in primary focus here, as 'living origami' and 'exotic black-and-white blossoms', and describes their flight in mesmerizing language. She writes about her growing awareness of the habits and patterns of the swallow-tailed kites, a bird that was once far more prominent than it is today. This draws her into a community of bird-watchers and scientists who, in the midst of their lives otherwise, come together in slowly widening circles to follow the progress of the kites.

Cerulean also brings much of her own experience with life into the book. She describes her relationships with her husband, her son, and other birders, such as biologist Ken Meyer. She describes experiences growing up, going to college, and moving about, eventually ending up in Florida. One memorable scene involves her grandfather and his battle with the garden in Florida, and the grapefruit tree in particular. It shows the difference of perspectives, as Cerulean writes that once it was cut down (after a long period of battle with the branches), 'the only plant that had really interested me in his manicured lawn was gone.' This echoes the slow decline of habitat of the kites over the decades, and the way life itself can slowly ebb away in unexpectedly depressing ways.

This isn't a story about loss, however, but rather one of discovery, perhaps even revelation. The parallels that are drawn between the lives of the birds and the lives of the humans in Cerulean's story are very interesting; the divergences also prove to be fascinating. One such is the search for stories about the kites - such dramatic creatures warrant dramatic stories, but the search was initially fruitless. Eventually, by expanding her horizons, Cerulean would come to discover a remarkable collection of tales and mytho-poetic images involving the impressive kites.

This is a beautifully crafted narrative, flying gracefully from highlight to highlight, and engaging the readers to want to learn more about the kites and themselves.