Three years ago, headlines delivered shocking news: nearly three billion birds in North America have vanished over the past fifty years. For the past year, journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal traveled more than 25,000 miles across the Americas, chronicling experiments, politics, and new technologies to save birds from the brink of extinction. A Wing and a Prayer offers hope and an urgent call to action.
In this five-star journey into our birding history, present and future, the authors make clear that ultimately, it's up to us — you and me — to care and to act.
No jeremiad. The authors, retirees, tour the country in their refurbished Airstream and calmly and competently report their observations ... The book provides vivid portraits of people on the front lines ... A Wing and a Prayer does a fine job of laying out the basics of the story, but what is missing, at least for the first hundred pages or so, are actual birds ... Thankfully, as the book progresses, the authors take a break from their reporting to describe their own close encounters with their neighborhood barred owls and great blue herons — because it is this connection and intimacy that can lead to a strange but vital metamorphosis in which love is transformed into action. After all, if you don’t love a thing, you won’t fight for it.
Written partially as a travelogue as the authors journeyed thousands of miles by road around the continent, the combination of personal story and scientific reportage is compelling.
