Category Archives: Endangered Species

Sentinels, or “How Bird Flu Really Got Cookin’” (FSB Book Review)

As we enter the holiday season, we find ourselves with a bit less time to blog. Braden is staying busy teaching birding classes, writing for Montana Outdoors and BWD magazines, and birding like crazy. I have also stayed busy pursuing a new college degree, finishing up editing my 2027 book Birding the Great Wide Open, and squeezing in birding whenever I can. Today, though, we present a review of what may be one of the most important books I’ve read in recent years. It’s one I hope you will pick up for yourself or other birders in your life as it has huge implications for the future of birds—and humans. Enjoy!

On New Year’s Eve, 2019, Braden and I visited a refuge called the Hula Valley Nature Reserve in northern Israel (see Braden’s post Winter Birding in Israel, Part II: Valley of the Cranes). Though small by some standards, the reserve holds a remarkable diversity of bird life. Riding around in golf carts under cool, damp skies, we observed 44 species including Pied Avocets, Ruffs, and both Booted and Greater Spotted Eagles. The marquee birds, the ones that attract thousands of visitors each year, were thousands of Common Cranes. In fields surrounding the reserve, we counted more than 2,000 of them—but no doubt missed many more.

In 2019, Braden and I were lucky enough to visit Israel’s fabulous Hula Valley Nature Reserve, where we saw more than 2,000 Common Cranes. Only the following year, the H5N1 bird flu virus swept through the reserve, killing more than 8,000 cranes along with many other birds.

Strikingly, our visit intersected with two important global events. Even as we stood watching the cranes, the COVID-19 virus was silently making its way out of China, poised to ravage the rest of the world. Braden and I, in fact, barely made it home before commercial air traffic ground to a halt.

The second event happened the following year, in 2021, when a virus known as H5N1 exploded across the planet. This virus killed untold millions of wild birds and other animals, including many threatened and endangered species. In northern Israel alone, H5N1 killed 8,000 Common Cranes in the Hula Valley, along with 1.6 million chickens and turkeys in commercial poultry facilities. In his new book Sentinels: When Diseases Spread Between Animals and Humans (Scribe Publications, 2026), author Michael Dulaney writes, “Of all the pathogens I’ve learned about this (H5N1) is the big one . . . It scares me more than anything else.” After reading his book, you may feel the same.

But let us back up a step.

In Sentinels, Delaney focuses on several kinds of diseases, including fungal diseases spread by the wildlife trade and, especially in the case of Valley Fever, our increased contact with and destruction of the environment. He also explores Trench Fever, a louse-borne disease made famous during World War I that is now re-emerging among destitute, unhoused populations around the world. However, Sentinels especially focuses on zoonotic diseases, those that spread between animals and people.

**Raptors have been hit especially hard by HPAI—Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. It remains to be seen how well populations will recover. (Eurasian Kestral shown.)**

Lest you think this is a niche topic, according to the CDC, three out of four new diseases in humans originate in animals. They include some of the world’s deadliest: Ebola, coronaviruses such as COVID-19, and H5N1. And if you haven’t already been convinced, the author presents overwhelming evidence that these kinds of diseases represent a significant, global threat to humanity.

As we all have witnessed in recent years, many zoonotic viruses cause human illness and death. However, while popular coverage of zoonotic diseases almost exclusively focuses on wild animals as a threat and source of illness, Sentinels makes clear that the underlying threat isn’t the animals—it is humanity’s rapid destruction of the environment and quest for economic expediency.

Let’s take a look at bird flu.

H5N1 is but one of several types of “bird flu” viruses that health authorities lump together under the name Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or HPAI. In his chapter titled “Henfluenza: Bird Flu”, Dulaney explains that H5N1 first emerged in the poultry industry of Southeast Asia in 1996. Since then, many outbreaks have been reported, often killing 100% of affected chickens and other poultry. In some cases, the disease has jumped to humans with deadly results. But in 2021 a new strain leaped from the poultry industry to wild birds, and those birds quickly carried it around the globe. One of the big surprises of this new strain is how, in addition to birds, it infected a wide array of mammal species including cats, foxes, polar bears, and other marine mammals. In Argentina, it killed tens of thousands of elephant seals, a blow from which the species may never recover. Nothing like that had happened in previous outbreaks.

HPAI’s toll on wild birds, though, has been particularly devastating. No one really has any idea of how many wild birds have died as a result of H5N1 and other bird flu viruses, but they have infected at least 500 different bird species and killed millions of birds. More than half of species affected had never before been hit by this group of viruses, and some bird species experienced die-offs that may have long-term consequences for their survival. In just one recent five month span, from September 2025 to January 2026, the US Geological Survey recorded 241 “bird mortality events” in 28 states, killing 126,000 wild birds. In 123 of these events, HPAI was confirmed or suspected as the cause. At the Great Salt Lake, more than 50,000 Eared Grebes died, twice the number of deaths from a similar outbreak the previous year. The USGS reported that this was the fourth year in a row avian influenza had been rampaging through wild bird populations.

We were lucky to visit the Hula reserve with some of our longtime friends, including biologist Avi Lourie (far right), who was a close friend of my late father (Braden’s grandfather). Little did we know how viruses were about to change the lives of both humans and wildlife.

As bird flu continues to circulate around the globe, it continues to devastate both wild and domestic bird populations. It also keeps jumping to humans. According to the CDC website, 72 cases and two deaths in the US have been reported since 2024. But while news outlets and official government websites continue to portray the risks to human health and domestic animals posed by wild birds, they utterly fail to address the underlying causes of bird flu and other zoonotic diseases.

Which is why Sentinels is such an important book. After reading it, you will have no doubt that it is our own actions that facilitate the mutation and spread of zoonotic diseases. Some are facilitated by the destruction of natural habitats, forcing animals into closer proximity to humans. The root cause of bird flu is the manner in which we raise animals for human consumption. While H5N1 once originated in wild bird populations, its ability to jump to other species was most likely severely limited. Factory farming, on the other hand, has been a virus’s dream come true.

In the US alone, 9.4 billion broiler chickens were “produced” in 2025. Egg-laying chickens cranked out 105 billion eggs. The vast majority of these chickens are grown in enormous, cramped facilities, where tens or even hundreds of thousands of birds are packed together in a single building. Chicken production in China dwarfs even these figures, with one facility supposedly containing three million chickens at any given time.

Although farmers and corporations strive to eliminate HPAI viruses, they are now so prevalant that they find their way into industrial, small scale, and backyard farms with shocking frequency. One recent update from the USDA recorded that in just the most recent 30 days, there had been 23 outbreaks affecting 1.25 million birds. Since February 8, 2022, the virus had infected 210 million birds in 2,285 flocks in all fifty states and one territory.

What happens to all of those birds? As you might guess, as soon as a virus is detected, the entire flock is destroyed, and the facility placed under quarantine. In other words, hundreds of millions of chickens, turkeys, and other domestic animals are killed and disposed of each year because of HPAI viruses. Amazingly, the poultry industry can easily absorb this waste while still making vast profits. According to the USDA, in 2025 the combined value of poultry sales, including eggs, was 70.3 billion dollars.

If enough of us change our own food shopping habits and begin applying pressure to our politicians to enforce a more humane, less dangerous industrial meat industry, humans may have a chance to prevent future pandemics caused by zoonotic viruses.

The main point of this is that within these high-density facilities, viruses can and do mutate at lightning speed. With increasing frequency and impact, they also spill over into wild populations of birds and other animals. That means that even if a wild bird species or population adapts to one strain, it is likely—perhaps inevitable—that another, even more virulent strain will come along. This, in fact, is what has been happening, and we may just be seeing the beginning of global pandemics that threaten entire species of birds and mammals, including humans.

Sentinels is a pretty terrifying read because there are no simple fixes to the problems that it highlights, many of which also are exacerbated by climate change. “This puts any writer on this subject in a tough position,” the author laments. “Most people, we are told, want to read good news.” His message, though, is clear: If we want to reduce the risk of zoonotic diseases, we have to do a much better job protecting the environment. We especially need to change the way we produce food. Is this likely? It’s hard to see how, and the author offers few suggestions. I do know that the book has compelled me to redouble my efforts to source food from farms and farmers that place quality, animal welfare, and human health at a greater premium. If enough people read Sentinels and act on its message, it may help turn the wheel toward a healthier future for both birds and humans.

To order Sentinels, CLICK HERE.

How Flowers Made Our World (FSB Book Review)

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Today, we’re pleased to present a book that is sure to transform your understanding of plants and their relationship to birds. I am just as pleased, however, to present my new website, www.sneedbcollardiii.com. Some of you probably know that for the past few years, I have devoted more of my writing efforts to writing for adults, and my new website reflects that evolution. Designed by wonderful web designer and birder Thomas Kallmeyer (tarns.net), the new site reflects an elegant simplicity that I just love. If you miss the old content, don’t worry. A button will lead you to it. With that, we present today’s review!

I’ve been studying biology and the environment for almost half a century, and the more I learn, the more I recognize that plants are the key to saving not only birds and other wildlife, but humanity. David George Haskell’s remarkable book How Flowers Made Our World brings that awareness sharply into focus.

**How Flowers Made Our World (Viking, 2026)**

Plants are a sweeping subject—enough to fill libraries—but Haskell breaks down the topic in an approachable fashion, targeting chapters on specific plants as a basis for broader discussions. The chapter titled Magnolia, for instance, introduces the overall strategies of beauty, scent, and sex that flowering plants use to attract pollinators and ensure reproduction. At the far end of the book, he uses his chapter Pansy to highlight how ornamental plant breeding and the use of pesticides have robbed our gardens of their ecological vitality and ability to support insects, birds, and other wildlife.

**In captivating prose, Haskell peels back the complex relationship between pollinators and the plants that manipulate them.**

In between these bookends lie a treasure of other topics. Two of my favorite chapters are Grass and Seagrass—not because I find either plant group particularly attractive but because their subjects are so darned interesting. Neither leaps to mind when someone mentions the words flowering plant, but they are both titans among the group. Human civilization, of course, never would have flourished without the cultivation of grasses, but Haskell reminds us just how much we owe them. Today, rice, maize, and wheat supply the world with two-thirds of our food calories. Left to prosper native grasses are among the world’s greatest soil builders and serve as the basis for mind-boggling ecological communities, including North America’s most threatened avian group, grassland birds. Oh, and grasslands have unprecedented abilities to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it where it can’t keep heating the planet.

**For humans, restoring grasslands that have been lost to industrial agriculture could be a key to surviving climate change.**

As for seagrasses, these hardy souls acquired mind-blowing adaptations that allowed them to invade the ocean from land. They may be the closest things we have to superheroes when it comes to protecting coastlines, preserving marine biodiversity, and—like terrestrial grasses—sequestering the carbon that is driving climate change. Haskell highlights inspirational projects in Scotland and Virginia in which humans are restoring seagrass beds with terrific results. Seagrasses, in fact, may become one of our most important allies in stabilizing shorelines as sea levels continue to rise. They also provide essential homes and nutrition to a vast web of marine life, from crabs and shrimp to fish and sea turtles.

**Beyond the important functions they serve in making Earth inhabitable, flowering plants bring us joy beyond measure—sometimes with the help of a good dog!**

Haskell’s final chapters sound the alarm on industrial agriculture and the unprecedented use of pesticides that are devastating insect populations and native plants alike. This is not simply a matter of protecting biodiversity, but of keeping the ecological building blocks in place that will allow us to survive in a rapidly changing world. He doesn’t ignore our own role in turning things around, either. Anyone with a yard can make a huge contribution by halting the use of pesticides and replacing sterile lawns and ornamentals with native plants that sustain the lives of insects and other animals (see our post Turning Useless Lawn into Vital Habitat). Although birds are given relatively minor mention in the book, by the time you finish reading it you won’t have any doubt that the fate of birds, insects, and flowering plants are inextricably linked.

**Given half a chance, both native plants and animals can rebound, as we’ve seen in the native plantings that surround our own house.**

Beyond all its other wonderful attributes, I have to applaud this book for one final thing: it revealed the identities of two “weeds” I have always wondered about in and around my house—goatsbeard and bittercress. If that isn’t a bonus, I don’t know what is!

Order Here.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This review is written and photographed entirely by REAL PEOPLE and we received no compensation for writing it—even if you order a copy with the above links.

Seabirds as Sentinels (FSB Book Review)

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All posts on FatherSonBirding are written and photographed by REAL PEOPLE.

I love living in Montana, but it has one huge drawback: no ocean. This has a particular impact on me and Braden because while we do get a fair number of shorebirds breeding in and passing through the Treasure State, we almost never have the opportunity to observe, study, and enjoy seabirds. You can therefore understand my particular interest in reading Eric Wagner’s new book, Seabirds As Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, Shearwaters, and the View from Destruction Island (University of Washington Press, 2026).

*Seabirds as Sentinels* by Eric Wagner, University of Washington Press. Click on image or here to order.

For me and many other birders, seabirds—also referred to as pelagic birds—are almost magical. Not only do they have incredible adaptations to live in what is arguably the world’s harshest environment, they are difficult, if not impossible, for most of us to watch. Loyal FSB readers will recall Braden’s and my account of our pelagic bird cruise during the San Diego Birding Festival (see post San Diego Seabirds). These and a precious few other puke-filled outings gave us rare opportunities to view shearwaters, murres, guillemots, and even albatrosses. Unfortunately, our time with these birds has been altogether too brief—a situation not likely to change anytime soon.

**Part of a group of approximately 8,000 Black-vented Shearwaters off the coast of San Diego in 2019.**

One of the real delights of Eric Wagner’s book is that he gives readers the chance to hang out with nesting Pacific Northwest seabirds, especially the Rhinoceros Auklet. Before reading Seabirds As Sentinels, I had seen Rhinoceros Auklets a couple of times, but had no idea where they bred. One answer, it turns out, is on certain islands off the coast of Washington and British Columbia. Wagner devotes a good portion of the book documenting scientists’ efforts to tag and learn about these birds as they nest on Destruction Island, only about three miles off the coast of the Olympic Peninsula.

**Photos from *Seabirds as Sentinels* including a Rhinoceros Auklet, bill filled with fish, in the upper right.**

His accounts of the birds range from their comical “crash landings” as they return to the island each night to feed their chicks to the birds’ remarkable ability to locate shoals of fish and dive deep underwater to catch them. Similar discussions revolve around Sooty Shearwaters and Tufted Puffins. What makes these accounts so captivating is seeing the birds’ activities “in person” through the author’s eyes, an experience most of us will never have.

**A Tufted Puffin from Braden’s and my first pelagic birding cruise off Monterey, California.**

Wagner, though, also wants to educate us, and provides discussions of how the world’s primary ocean currents are generated and how these currents impact marine life. He traces the human history of the region from around the time of first European contact to modern day, including recent tribal efforts to protect an environment increasingly at risk from climate change’s many ramifications.

Black-footed Albatrosses are one of the birds most impacted by human activities. According to Wagner, tens of thousands have died in Hawai’i’s longline tuna fishery alone. (Photo taken off the coast of Monterey, California in 2016.)

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to talk about seabirds without pointing out the cataclysmic declines in many species, and the author doesn’t shy away from the topic. As the title suggests, the decline of seabirds mirrors the dramatic impacts human activities are having on our planet. Perhaps most alarming has been the appearance of “blobs,” persistent and unprecedented areas of warm water that either kill or drive away the prey seabirds and a host of other species depend on. Estimates of how many seabirds have died during recent blobs are mind-boggling. As many as four million Common Murres alone may have starved to death as a result of the blob of 2015 and 2016—about half of Alaska’s Common Murre population.

**Common Murres have already been severely impacted by warmer ocean temperatures (Monterey, California, 2016).**

The author doesn’t provide us with any false solutions about this and other environmental problems. After all, we all know what we have to do. We have to stop burning fossil fuels. We have to stop using our ocean as a dumping ground for plastics and other waste. We have to quit overfishing the prey species thousands of other species also depend on. What the book does do, though, is raise our awareness of why these things matter—and perhaps provide each of us with the resolve to keep working toward a solution in whatever ways we can.

If you enjoyed this post, check out our other bird-related book reviews such as The Great Auk and The Shorebirds of North America.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Gunnison Sage-grouse: Bird #13 on Braden’s ABA Life List Countdown, April 10th, 2026

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Today, Braden shares the latest installment of his series counting down the remaining ABA Life Birds he has been attempting to see. It’s just like listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 Countdown—but better, because it’s about BIRDS! To catch up on his other recent life bird adventures, click on these previous posts:

Black-chinned Sparrow: Bird #14 on Braden’s ABA Life List Countdown

Fulvous Whistling-Duck: Bird #15 on Braden’s ABA Life List Countdown

Lower 48 Life List Countdown: Crissal Thrasher (Bird #16)

The sun still hadn’t woken up when I pulled over behind the half dozen or so other cars parked along the side of the road. I rolled down my window as a local game biologist approached.

“Are you here for the grouse?”

“Yes,” I answered quietly as a Horned Lark began singing somewhere in the darkness.

“And where are you from?”

“Montana, though I’m en route from California.”

She marked a few things off on her clipboard, then returned to her car. Through the gray pre-dawn darkness, I could make out a huge field of sagebrush, the foreground for Ponderosa-covered hills rising in the distance. In other words, my car was parked on a dirt road surrounded by a typical landscape of the American West. Even the birds were similar to those found in Montana: a winnowing Wilson’s Snipe, calling Red-winged Blackbirds, the husky chirps of a singing Mountain Bluebird. And yet, in Gunnison County, Colorado, there lives a bird that has never lived in Montana. Me and the other birders, silhouetted through their car windows, had driven from various corners of the country to see it: The Gunnison Sage-grouse.

**The Gunnison Sage-grouse birder “lek” watching the actual Gunnison Sage-grouse lek in the distance at sunrise.**

Superficially, Gunnison Sage-grouse and Greater Sage-grouse aren’t all that different. Both species require expansive sagebrush habitats like the plain that stretched out before me in the rising light. The Greater is larger (hence the name), and, during the breeding season, Gunnisons have much longer filoplumes adorning the males’ heads. While Greater Sage-grouse are found across much of the West, Gunnisons occupy only a small area in Colorado and western Utah. The ranges of the two birds do not overlap.

**Many of the birds I saw while driving through Colorado reminded me of my home in Montana—complete with meadowlarks on signs!**

Sage-grouse breeding displays are some of North America’s most famous avian experiences. Males and females gather in breeding groups in early spring. Both the breeding groups and their display grounds are commonly referred to as leks. While lekking, the males, decked out in the most ridiculous plumage of any North American bird, pump their chests to the viewing amusement of nearby females. Although I’d seen Greater Sage-grouse a few times in my life, I’d never been able to experience one of these leks. And while there are several sites across the country where one might watch a Greater Sage-grouse lek, there is only a single public Gunnison Sage-grouse lek, a spot about fifteen miles east of Waunita Watchable Wildlife Area. Because of their small population and increasing threats to the habitats they’re found in, the grouse are endangered, and so the public lek is open for viewing only during certain weeks of the year. I had arrived on April 10th, the last day the lek would be open for another two weeks.

About half an hour before dawn, another birder’s car alarm went off. I could see everyone in their cars wince—Gunnison Sage-grouse are quite sensitive to disturbance, and this could have been enough to send them scampering away. Thankfully, the birds (which were about ¾ of a mile away from the road), didn’t seem bothered, and about ten minutes later, I began to hear the popping sounds of their displays. I eventually located them, distant black dots, even through my binoculars. Fifteen minutes later, with the permission of the biologist, we started getting out of our cars to set up spotting scopes.

Though our “birder lek” stood too far away from the Gunnison Sage-grouse to get photos, their behavior is very similar to lekking Sharp-tailed Grouse, captured here by my dad at Benton Lake NWR a couple of years ago (see post “The Best Prairie Day Ever: Benton Lake NWR.”)

Through the scope my viewing experience was marginally better. I could make out the males, with their furry white chests and black heads, pumping their shoulders at each other. Occasionally, a female would scamper through my view. Though far away, lekking sage-grouse had been on my bucket list for years and taking them in as the sun peeked above the horizon could only be described as a magical experience. Fog escaped my lips every time I took a breath, and a few nearby Sage Thrashers began singing across the road from us. Soon my fellow birders were beginning to whisper to each other, and I learned just how far people had come to see these birds. The man in the car whose alarm had gone off had driven through the night from Oregon en route to a bird point-count job in Oklahoma, stopping here just for this species. Another man had come here from a few hours away.

**As my dad pointed out in his recent post “Colorado’s Ute Mountain Mesa Verde Birding Festival,” numbers of Spotted Towhees in Colorado are CRAZY!**

“My kid loves it, birding,” he said to me. “The last year especially, he’s really gotten into it. He wanted to see these grouse, so here we are.” I couldn’t help but see the similarities between that father and son and my birding experiences with my own dad.

After about four minutes of the grouse lekking, a group of birders stormed out of the blind that was set up beside the cars. I’d run into this group last night and learned they were doing a “chicken run.” Colorado is known for having almost every grouse species in the US and tour groups often target all of them during weeks in March and April. One of the birders asked if I knew any nearby spots for White-tailed Ptarmigan before the four of them noisily piled into their car and drove away. So much for staying quiet while the grouse were displaying! Either way, the birds didn’t seem to mind.

**I was especially excited to see Pinyon Jays in Colorado, since they can be a challenge to find back home.**

Beyond seeing these endangered birds, I had been enjoying seeing more and more landscapes that reminded me of home as I neared the middle of my road trip back to Montana. On my drives through Arizona and Colorado I watched the desert transition into mountainous valleys, complete with juniper and sagebrush-covered canyons, rushing streams with permanent water, and the snowcapped peaks of the San Juans and other mountain ranges. Of course, my trip was nowhere near over. I’d be visiting several more new habitats before that happened. In fact, one of those habitats would be later in the day, where I might just manage to see another life bird! Stay tuned to see what comes next . . .

A World on the Wing (Book Review)

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With fewer birds around, winter is an excellent chance to catch up on bird-related reading, both for enjoyment and education. I find this a perfect time to check out both new bird-related titles, and older books that I have somehow overlooked. Speaking of the latter, during the December holiday my father-in-law handed me Scott Weidensaul’s remarkable 2021 release, A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds (W. W. Norton). I’m so glad that he did!

**An easy reading style, engaging storytelling, and fascinating information render A WORLD ON THE WING one of a handful of required reading books for birders.** (Click on the image for ordering information.)

In A World on the Wing, Weidensaul manages to take an overwhelming body of global information about bird migration and distill it into a series of stories that give the reader a captivating picture of what’s going on out there. The book’s first chapter hooked me immediately with the author’s visit to one of the world’s most vital shorebird stopover sites—and one I knew almost nothing about—the mudflats surrounding the Yellow Sea. These mudflats are nothing less than the linchpin to the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF), a vast, complicated series of routes used by millions of birds migrating from the Southern Hemisphere to breeding grounds in the far north. According to an online UNESCO article, about ten percent of all migrating birds on the EAAF depend on the Yellow Sea stopover area. They include two of the planet’s rarest shorebirds, the “Spoonie”, or Spoon-billed Sandpiper, with a population estimate of about 500 or fewer, and Nordman’s Greenshank with fewer than 2,000 individuals. Beyond that, the area provides critical support to 400 other bird species, including 45 considered threatened.

My 2023 visit to Japan highlighted how extensively crucial habitats for migrating birds have been gobbled up and polluted by development across the globe.

This first chapter sets the tone for a global, diverse journey through myriad aspects of bird migration. One chapter focuses on the incredible physiological adaptations of migrating birds, including their abilities to sleep on the wing, reduce or increase the size of internal organs to optimize weight and function, and navigate by taking advantage of quantum physics. Other chapters focus on species or groups of migrating birds across the globe. Some of these birds, such as the Kirtland’s Warbler and Snowy Owl, will be familiar to many readers while others, such as Bar-tailed Godwits and Amur Falcons, are less so. Every chapter, though, is filled not only with revelations, but personal anecdotes and experiences that make the stories come alive.

While many key stopover sites have been protected in North America, our own migrating bird numbers continue to plummet. Shorebird species have been especially hard-hit. (Shown here: Dunlins at Fort Stevens State Park, Oregon.)

Taken as a whole, the book serves as an impassioned plea to protect migratory birds and, well, just do things better on this planet. The crucial mudflats of the Yellow Sea, for instance, are critically imperiled by industrial development, pollution, and interruption of sediment flow caused by thousands of dams across China’s rivers. It’s not that the loss of these mudflats would put a dent in bird populations. It could wipe them out. The author quotes one scientist as saying, “There is no more buffer. There is no more ‘somewhere else’ for these migrants.” The threats to migrating birds are multiple and widespread, varying only in their particulars. In some places, pesticides take terrible tolls. In other places, it’s illegal hunting for local culinary specialties. Almost everywhere, habitat loss and climate change loom large.

In Cyprus, Italy, France, and other countries, millions of migrating songbirds are needlessly and illegally slaughtered to satisfy traditional and/or eccentric culinary tastes. According to an Audubon article, at least 157 species are caught, including 90 species of conservation concern. (Shown here: European Robin.)

Somehow, the author manages to balance these threats with the overarching wonder of bird migration and leaves the reader feeling hopeful—or at least determined—along with being much better informed. This balance, along with the engaging writing style and storytelling make this one of a handful of bird-related books that I consider required reading for anyone interested in birds and conservation.

Order this book at your local independent bookstore!