Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds - Tapa dura

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.

Scott Weidensaul is the author of Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians and other books. A columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, he is also a federally licensed bird bander in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, where he lives.