Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration

by Rebecca Heisman

[ MP3 CD Format ] The captivating, little-known true story of a group of scientists and the methods and technology they developed to uncover the secrets of avian migration. For the past century, scientists and naturalists have been steadily unravelling the secrets of bird migration. How and why birds navigate the skies, traveling from continent to continent -- flying thousands of miles across the earth each fall and spring -- has continually fascinated the human imagination, but only recently have we been able to fully understand these amazing journeys. Although we know much more than ever before, even the most enthusiastic birdwatcher may not know how we got here, the ways that the full breadth of scientific disciplines have come together to reveal these annual avian travels. Flight Paths is the never-before-told story of how a group of migration-obsessed scientists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries engaged nearly every branch of science to understand bird migration -- from where and when they take off to their flight paths and behaviors, their destinations and the challenges they encounter getting there. Uniting curious minds from across generations, continents, and disciplines, bird enthusiast and science writer Rebecca Heisman traces the development of each technique used for tracking migratory birds, from the first attempts to mark individual birds to the cutting-edge technology that lets ornithologists trace where a bird has been, based on unique DNA markers. Along the way, she touches on the biggest technological breakthroughs of modern science and reveals the almost-forgotten stories of the scientists who harnessed these inventions in service of furthering our understanding of nature (and their personal obsession with birds). The compelling and fascinating story of how scientists solved the great mystery of bird migration, Flight Paths is an unprecedented look into exciting, behind-the-scenes moments of groundbreaking discovery. Heisman demonstrates that the real power of science happens when people work together, focusing their minds and knowledge on a common goal. While the world looks to tackle massive challenges involving conservation and climate, the story of migration research offers a beacon of hope that we can find solutions to difficult and complex problems.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Nature, Birds, Animals, Environment, Audiobook

1 pages, Audio CD

First published March 14, 2023

About the author

Hi! I live in Walla Walla, Washington and I write about birds. My first book, Flight Paths, delves into the history, science, and quirky personalities behind *how* we know what we know about bird migration.

Reviews

[Auriel Fournier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rebecca Heisman does a remarkable job of capturing the joy and wonder of bird migration and science studying it, while also breaking down the complex methods we use to study it into pieces we can understand. I love how she wove history in with her own experiences and field trips and helped me see the wonder of bird migration and bird science in a new way.

[Katrina Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This looks at ornithological research methods rather than looking at bird behaviour/physiology which is what I was to be honest hoping for. But still full of the interesting developments in technology and the resulting research. Amazing example of the variety of backgrounds that scientists and experts have all come from.

Radars, transmitters, night call surveys, loggers, ringing, genetics, isotopes, light surveying, citizen surveys.

I've made some really random notes on each chapter:

- Banding (ringing) being the first opportunity to track bird migration and dispel incorrect theories. Shows birds are adapting migration dates due to climate change, but sadly their destination isn't necessarily compatible at that earlier date.

- Hadn't ever considered nocturnal night call IDing. Bird call recording and software to identify species. Watching birds fly across the face of the moon. Nationwide study with thousands of volunteers watching migration, data that took 14years to turn into a paper.

- 40s naval radar operators picking up flocks. Cue nerding on radar technology and how it has developed. Led to weather forecasting as well as data on the impact of things like light pollution on bird movement.

- Radiotagging with eyelash glue. Telemetry for real time data. Dual purpose satellites for spying and natural history. The leg band distorts the signal frequency, capturing wing beats and breaths- woah. Chasing Finches in flight. Motus Wildlife Tracking system of a network of towers in the Andes. Signature beep sequences. Chats with Bill Cochran. The motus database.

- Tracking bird flight from space. Starting big on mute swans, then down to sandpipers. Reducing the size of transmitters by a hundredfold.

- Chatting to Rory Wilson, using sunlight hours to mark distances travelled. 'Light level geocaters'. Discovering that the blackpool warbler is one of the most long distance travellers. Recapturing loggers to access the data.

- Isotope analysis. Ratio of hydrogen to deuterium in a feather reflecting that of the location where it was grown. Birds placed at their breeding ranges by the data. Need to alanyse water in the area to know its isotope ratio, so when birds moult and regrow feathers somewhere far away, we might not be able to pinpoint where exactly. Looking at museum specimens to get a look back in time: blackpoll breeding range shifting 370miles in 44 years.

- A 'genoscape'... Now vaguely understand. Frozen feather collection is kinda a scary mental image. Genetic analysis discovering six genetically distinct groups of warbler with different migratory routed and wintering grounds. Predicting the impact of climate change on specific genetic populations.

-Citizen science e.g. Christmas Bird Count. Breeding Bird Survey for trends. Using apps like ebird generating huge amounts of data on especially incidental sightings.

-2020 cancer and pandemic. So much missing data and hugs biodiversity loss, but choosing hope. Huge collaboration and work of birders and researchers. Bird and humans need the same thing. Birds "knit the world together".

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm. There were some interesting tidbits in here but I was too annoyed at reading about the author finding some scientist on twitter or whatever. Felt very much like a high school paper, trying to stretch the word count. Actually did not finish it because of this.

[Tilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 Stars

I have read a few birding books recently that fell a little flat, so I had mixed feelings going into this book. However I didn't neednto worry as this was definitely the best book on overall bird migration that I have read.

Rebecca Heisman obviously has a lot of love, interest and background in ornithology and mapping birds in a variety of ways. What makes this book even better is her fantastic writing and obvious love for what she is discussing but also her personal experiences and field trips that are interwoven with the histroy and the science of mapping birds and their migration.

The book is split up really well and looks into how bird migration has changed over time. I found this particularly interesting as I had no idea how early ornithologists would have collected data on bird migration so it was a really interesting read for me. Seeing how this has changed with increasing technology is great to read and I learnt a lot about the science behind collecting data. I could have done with a few maps but that is not a big enough issue that it takes away from this 5 star review.

What added to this was that Heisman added how different species of birds have to be treated differently in the ways to collect their data. Looking into individual case studies for these added this extra insight plus a side of birding which I loved.

Overall, this is book is very well written and highly interesting. I read a lot of new stories and insights into this subject which I wasn't expecting! I highly recommend this book to all bird lovers.

Please note that I was gifted this ebook in exchange for an honest review.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appropriate read as we're starting to see this year's spring migrators. Birds are amazing. Imagine flying for three days straight over open ocean. I can barely stay up past 10.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book takes a wholesome tour of the history of ornithology, specifically focused on different techniques used to track bird migration. Different chapters delve into banding (tracking birds by placing small metal cuffs on their feet), monitoring bird calls, analyzing radar, tracking via tiny GPS “backpacks,” identifying isotopes inside of feathers, comparing DNA profiles, and more. It was very comprehensive and I enjoyed how much the author clearly loves birding. It was fun to watch scientific techniques for a specific niche evolve over time.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the questions I often ask in book club discussions of nonfiction books is "Did you feel there were too many scientific facts, or not enough, or just the right amount?" Flight Paths unfortunately was a little too science-y to truly qualify as popular nonfiction. There were sections I really could not follow (or perhaps I just didn't want to make the effort to follow). ("Imagine you're a deuterium atom." Say what now?)

But in between the love of scientific facts, the author's love of birds does come through. Migration is truly amazing, and awe over the migration spectacle also comes through. I always enjoy reading about banding birds (and how weirdly attitudinal some birds are, and that there are even birds that seem to enjoy being caught in mist-nets), and I liked that she included information about citizen science projects like Project Feederwatch and the Great Backyard Bird Count.

The book is well written and seems well researched. I liked that when it came to the attaching of tracking devices to tiny birds, she asked not just researchers but also an animal ethicist whether this is the right thing to do. ("How do we decide when the benefits of the knowledge we gain from these studies outweigh the potential harm to the individual birds?" p. 140)

If you really love birds, you might find Flight Paths worth the effort. (And as always, I encourage you to give yourself permission to skim pasts any parts that make your eyes glaze over.)

[Megan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate this book. Too technical. Gimme bird stories.

[Kim Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rebecca Heisman provides an amazing tour of how scientists have worked for years to better understand bird migration. She dives deep into the scientific studies, assortment of researchers, and various techniques that have been at work for years seeking to understand how so many birds do what they do - undertake amazing migrations routes with no maps or suitcases!

This book was packed with a wealth of scientific details from ornithological studies, as well as a view into the unique researchers whose creativity has shed light on the mystery of bird migration. I will need to read this entire book again to fully understand all that is packed within it and to better grasp how birds do what they do. I highly recommend this to anyone passionate about birds and who also love the details, subtlety, and minutia of scientific inquiry!

I only question the title of this book. After reading it, I feel the mystery of bird migration is not yet wholly solved. Many of the featured scientists are continuing their studies and much is yet to be learned on the marvels of bird migration.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a fairly amateur birder since 2020. But I've listened to lots of books on birding, including Scott Widensaul's "A World on the Wing." I find books on bird migration particularly interesting. I'm always glad when Nate Swick or Ivan Phillipsen tackle something related to migration on their podcasts. So I know a little bit (emphasis on "little bit"!) about bird migration, and I find it fascinating. So I was excited about this book.
The author does an excellent job of interviewing all the right people and reviewing all the right studies, as far as I can tell. It's well written and engaging. Sure, there are a couple of chapters that get very "science-y" for a non-scientist reader, but I tried to follow them as best I could. I wasn't deterred by them at all. It was a very interesting read full of lots of surprises. I was regularly telling my wife after listening to a chapter: "Did you know that...?" There was a lot to learn. And it was fun to learn it.
However, the biggest disappointment for me with the book was that I never felt like I got what the subtitle offers. With a subtitle like, "How a passionate and quirky group of pioneering scientists SOLVED the mystery of bird migration," I expected the book to end with some sort of concluding chapter that pulled all the myriad studies together into one cohesive explanatory theory about the why and how and so forth of bird migration. But that never really came. There was a lot of really good discussion and exploration of some fascinating studies and experiments and so forth related to bird migration, but I don't think the book delivered on "solving" the mystery of bird migration. If the author did try to deliver on that, it was so subtle that I missed it entirely.
Bird migration is amazing, impressive, majestic, inspiring, heroic, and a host of other things, but even after this book, it still remains enigmatic. I'm fine with that; I just thought the book was going do to something different than what it did. The book explores, examines, inspects, investigates, probes, studies, and even increases our wonder at and appreciation for the marvelous phenomenon of bird migration, but it doesn't really "solve" the mystery of it.

[Mathewsjh · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating is probably too harsh. It was indeed a fascinating recounting of efforts to learn about + record bird migration with many interesting stories for the reader. I thought it could have used a bit more editing and been structured a little better. Anyone interested in birds our bird migration should enjoy this book.

[Niall Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read for anyone interested in the niche, but incredibly important, area of bird migration science. I enjoyed the perspective of this book as you often hear about the science but not necessarily those who made the science happen.

[Flynn O'Dacre · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED this book (:

[Krysia Kustra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched, with lots of information that's dense, but fascinating! I learned history not only about birding, but technology, which I wasn't expecting.

[Sean Brustuen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good - never quite finished it, but I will probably pick it up and knock off another chapter here and there when I’m in the mood. Fun facts about bird migration for sure.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good book about the summary of migration. Understanding bird migration has come a long ways.

[Kalina Eskew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does a really great job of reviewing the migration literature while focusing on the people behind it! As an ornithologist myself, I loved learning the stories behind how people got into researching birds.

[Katie Keeshen]

super fascinating stuff and accessible and engaging! Liked this significantly better than a book I read last year on the same topic so!

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am the daughter of an engineer and a nurse, so I inherited a love of science naturally. I have loved photographing birds in recent years and still remember the thrill of seeing a flock of snow geese take off for the first time during their migration season -- wondrous! When I saw this book's title, it immediately interested me.

The study of bird migrations and the impact of these studies in preserving species of birds is a fairly recent development in scientific studies. As recently as 2007, a shorebird named E7 became newsworthy for his migration. A bar-tailed godwit, a bird described as being the size of a football, was banded and tracked as flying from in a single long, unbroken flight from Alaska to New Zealand...7,000 miles! The longest nonstop migratory flight ever recorded.

The way ornithology has developed studies with banding, mesh nets, electronic chips, radar, satellites and isotopic studies of bird feathers to uncover a bird's history is fascinating. From an ecological standpoint, these studies are critical as an alarming decline of 3 billion birds has occurred in North America since 1970.

The people that studied birds and flight patterns were interesting as well. A man (Piersma) living in a small Dutch village, Gaast, studied martins who migrated to Africa. He supplied feathers for isotope analysis and wrote a paper entitled, "Solving the Migration Riddle." But, his neighbor didn't subscribe to scholarly journals, so Piersma wrote a book about his house martins for his fellow villagers in Gaast, where the locals speak not Dutch but a minority language--Frisian. His book, "Guests of Summer: A House Martin Love Story" sold around 6,000 copies.

With local DC area pride, I read about Chandler Robbins who worked at the Patuxent Research Refuge for decades, who worked with Rachel Carson, and who was heralded by the Washington Post in his 2017 obit as the "Bruce Springsteen of birding." Mr. Robbins documented avian life around the world, including on the Pacific island of Midway, where in 1956 he tagged a young Laysan albatross who came to be known as Wisdom. She is the oldest known wild bird, a matriarch who laid an egg as recently as December 2017.

I guess I'm officially a "birder." 5 big stars for this book on birds.

[historic_chronicles · Rating 4 out of 5]

"For centuries we looked to the skies and wondered...where did the birds go each winter, and how?"

I have always lived near a harbour, with my grandfather having worked the docks, the coast is a comforting place for me and I frequently see migratory birds, often geese travelling in their impressive v-formation as they seek a warmer climate in the harsh winter months. I've often marvelled at this great event that takes place year after year, how it works, and so when the opportunity came up to review Rebecca Heisman's book, Flight Paths, I leapt at the chance.

Heisman directs us through the science behind bird migration - the methods, the individuals, the history and her own personal experiences.

It's a vast and complicated history, which has been corrected and debated upon over the years, however Heisman does a wonderful job at pinpointing the most valuable sources of information and flipping them into a fresh and more digestible narrative that is easily understood.

I found the methods particularly fascinating, such as banding, mesh nets, radar and even isotopic analysis of feathers which further explore the history of birds.

As with most current nature-related texts, what cannot be ignored is the effects of climate change and Heisman maps out a respectable balance between ornithology and ecology, highlighting the decline of birds in counts and the consequences of the changes of seasonal patterns.

While I was already a bird lover before reading this book, following its conclusion I had a renewed sense of appreciation for the hard work that goes into the science of understanding our feathered friends and also the sheer passion that many have for birdwatching.

Many thanks to @_swiftpress for sending me this beautiful proof copy of Flight Paths!

[Katrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the book's strongest points is the way it blends fascinating facts about birds with the technical aspects of how these migrations are tracked and studied. I particularly loved the detailed bird facts, which brought to life the incredible feats these creatures achieve during their long journeys.

The progress in tracking methods, from early color banding to modern GPS and isotope analysis, adds a compelling layer to the narrative. Heisman does a fantastic job of making complex scientific advancements accessible without losing the wonder of bird migration. Her approachable writing style ensures that even technical discussions, such as genome sequencing, remain engaging.

[Cade · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book because I am amazed at the details of some bird migrations. It turned out, this book discussed the birds themselves only incidentally. It is really about the techniques used to study migrations and the people who developed them. The details of the migrations themselves only come into the book obliquely when explaining why they pose a logistical or technical challenge to specific tracking techniques.

This book takes for granted that the reader is a bird lover who finds birds intrinsically interesting and who sees bird conservation as self-evidently desirable. Therefore, the author's attempts to "sell" interest in the book to the reader are only meaningful/engaging if you share that premise/background.

[Terry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me. Maybe I should have known better, when a book first published only months previously is on the bargain shelf in the shop it is there for a reason. The introduction was good and full of birding promise. However from then on it became boring. If you are a U.S based birder maybe it’s ok but for me based in the UK I didn’t find it relevant or remotely interesting.
This book went from purchase to charity shop in the space of 24 hours. A waste of money. Also the term banded meaning ringed annoyed the heck out of me.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

disappointingly boring, and I got really tired of the author describing her reliance on twitter, which feels very dated today

[John Monro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, hardcover, published by Harper Collins in the US, and Swift Press in the UK, was a birthday present from my wife, bought here in NZ, so cost unknown. Rebecca Heisman has written articles for various publication and has worked for the American Ornithological Society. It was a quick and easy read, in a conversational, almost gossipy, style. The science is presented as a historical sequence of various methods of understanding bird migration, from simple banding in the 1800s to DNA analysis today, with on the way, light sensors, looking at the moon, radio antennae, GPS and crowd science via smart phone apps. . An interesting part of this is how the different methods have given different and complimentary information. The book expands each subject by introducing the scientists, the protagonists, who have developed these methods, and how others have taken them up. Rebecca delights in informing us of any eccentricities in these people in a sentence of two of potted biography, I suppose to bring them to life a wee bit, and to be fair, this is part of her stated purpose. There's a full appendix of references, sites for suitable further study or which have been referred to in the text and an adequate index. All credit to the writer that serious illness and cancer chemotherapy gave her the urge to write this book in the first place.

Things to note

1. The book is very US centric. It would seem many of the schemes for such research were developed in the US, so that's fine, but other countries and their bird migrations get very little coverage or mostly none at all. So for me in here New Zealand (the country is mentioned in regard to Arctic Migration of the bar-tailed godwit - though "New Zealand" doesn't appear in the index) or my being an expatriate Brit the book loses a bit of relevance.

2. There are no illustrations, a bit of a shame, even the odd line drawing of a studied bird would have been nice. Worse though is there are no maps, which actually seems a bit perverse in a book about bird migration. I had to do some computer checks on the way through reading.

3. It is not in any way a "scholarly tome" It is for the general reader and nature and bird lover to give a bit of background on a fascinating subject, which for more detail and reference you'll have to consult elsewhere or nowadays, internet resources

4. At the end of the book there's a reference to the app eBird in which you can report bird sightings from anywhere, which will end up in some humungous database, where the observations will be filtered and sorted and published and graphed. I've just downloaded this and I'll see how we go. There are many downloadable bird guides for smart phones, computers and tablets now.

5 The title needs editing, there's still a lot to solve about the mystery of bird migration, so better would be ".....are solving....." for instance.

So worth a read? Certainly. Worth the price? Well, I don't know but as it was a present, so no complaints there.

[Tim O'Connell · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an ornithologist, I am constantly reading scientific journal articles and drafts of hopeful future articles. Rarely do I have the chance to read a long-form book as a respite from the hyper-reductionist writing in which I'm immersed every day, and I have to admit that I sometimes avoid them as distractions from the reading I *should* be doing. Rebecca Heisman's Flight Paths has beautifully threaded that needle for me, blending her superb gifts for storytelling and distillation of complex topics into digestible form. Were there less focus on the people who'd done the work, Flight Paths would have been an excellent reference for looking things up without much reward for reading it cover to cover. Had Flight Paths shied away from the detail it provides it would have left readers to understand that smart people had done interesting things to learn about avian migration, but it would not have helped readers to understand precisely what those smart people had discovered. Somehow, Heisman has crafted Flight Paths to reflect both the human and technological elements, and masterfully so.

My career largely overlaps the recent decades of technological advances in the study of migration that Heisman chronicles. I know some of the papers behind specific chapters, I've met many of the scientists featured, I was in the audience for some of the anecdotes about the reception of certain presentations at ornithological meetings. As I work to amass those experiences into a narrative for my students, however, I can easily lose track of the sequence of developments or the key players involved at any given time. I can refer them to important papers and occasionally offer a story of meeting some one relevant here or there, but that would be disjointed, incomplete, and require work on the part of the students to piece it all together. This is part 1 of the gift Rebecca Heisman has given us in Flight Paths: There simply is no better primer to come to understand the history of humankind's efforts to advance our understanding of bird migration. That story is riveting, marked by creative thought, technological development, and a Eureka moment in every chapter.

Part 2 of Heisman's gift is this: Even for people like me with decades of bird study behind us, Flight Paths taps into the wonder that drew us to birds in the first place. Imagination and admiration directed toward the comings and goings of wild birds is an experience as human as making tools or telling stories around a communal fire. You might think that an effort to meet with ornithologists working at the cutting edge of 21st Century technology in radar, stable isotopes, satellite communications, genomics, or supercomputers would lessen our wonder by reducing the totality of the unknown. In Flight Paths, however, the opposite is true: it fans the flames of the quest for knowledge all the more. This book will not only impart knowledge, it will fertilize the garden of your creative thought.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of info, but poor writing at start: I corrected is-ness (overuse of vb to be), lack of parallel
structure, redundancy, etc. See “Those strict requirements help ensure [that] banding [is overall] safe[ty] for birds”(p.11). Eliminate is, get a better verb, more epigrammatic sentence. Later in same paragraph, “shows that for every thousand birds [that are] captured in mist nets, fewer than six suffer any injury.” Later on same page, “A cardinal’s massive bill [is powerful enough to] can tear off an aluminum band.”
So, “the story picks up with Leon L. Cole. [Cole was] born in 1877” (15).

As I read, I notice birds I know better than this world-traveller; say, the northern flicker “a species of woodpecker”(17). Yes, but I see flickers eating ants between patio bricks. Erlich et al (Birder's Handbook) confirm Flickers eat the most ants!

Writing improves, wonderful on nocturnal flight calls, often birds never seen in the day-- Swainson's Thrushes [90,000 of 'em] (37)-- and on night migrants' mysteriously drawn to city lights--as many as a billion killed in collisions in U.S. alone, with tower windows in Dallas, Houston (66)-- and on development of radar, large shapes not rain but migrant flocks (78). Especially on "Follow that Beep," where they (eyelash) glue onto a Swainson's thrush a tiny transmitter, weight of a dime, and follow it in a plane spiked with antennae, across Lake Michigan, to the Canadian border (81). Most such tracking's with a truck and giant antennae on top.

Fascinating sidebars, like Leon Cole’s becoming a gene scientist, and then, a racist inspiration to Hitler. Cole wanted permanent segregation of “defectives” to prevent them from passing on their inferior qualities (19). Yet at the end of this paragraph Heisman drops an uncertain parallel syntax …”and acted as a scientific consultant.”

In Ohio, Samuel Prentiss Baldwin banded birds using cages on his farm outside Cleveland. He worked to reduce the House-sparrows who had beat back native birds. Photos show him in 1919 in a bow tie and dapper hat. He got to know individual birds, one White-throated sparrow (who I add, makes “Peabody…Peee buh de,” dotted rhythm) always fighting, biting his finger, another “distinguished himself as a squealer”(21).

Once mist nets came in, migration often puzzled. Tiny Blackpoll warblers in spring migrate up from S. America, caught in East Coast nets. But not their Fall migration, which skips the American South, and the Caribbean— all in one leap over the Atlantic. I'd seen elsewhere that when some Hummingbirds make it across the Caribbean, they have only a few minutes to find sugar or die.

[Bill Weaver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard an interview with the author on my favorite birding podcast. The interviewer joked that he didn't know bird migration had been solved. She joked that her publisher had input on the title.

Anyway, this book is very very niche. It's not necessarily about birds, birding, or migration.  It's about the evolution of the scientific study of migration, really focusing on banding, telemetry, and the macro-data science applied en masse on what others gather from those micro-efforts. It's very interesting, but shouldn't be mistaken for more general, bird-focused migration books like A World on the Wing or A Season on the Wind (and apparently Flight Plans is the first migration book not to be a Somthing on the Something). The scientists working on migration are the focus here, quite intentionally. 

But maybe it was too niche. I worry anyone readingthis niche book--I assume birders--would already know about mist nets, banding, and ebird. I did. Although I didn't know about the original way to count migrating birds, which was to lie all night on your back during migration season and count how many birds you see cross the moon! What's even more crazy about that is how consistently these early scientists did it, allowing meta-analysis over the years and locations. 

I also learned that although technology allows smaller and smaller trackers, apparently no one is using the small trackers to ensure they annoy birds less. Smaller trackers just mean scientists can now track even smaller birds that couldn't have carried trackers before. Oh well.

For nonfiction, the author also inserted herself a lot into the book. The book goes back and forth between history and the author emailing with scientists or showing up at their houses. This may annoy some readers, but she did it well enough that it didn't bother me much.

In any case, the book was fine, and the length was perfectly short for the subject, but this still seemed better for a long magazine article or a podcast. I'm glad she wrote it, I'm glad these scientists had their stories told, and more bird books always is a good thing, but I worry even dedicated birders may find their attention... migrating (sorry, that was terrible).

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to enjoy this book, but it was underwhelming. To begin, the writing itself is mediocre and it seems like the author did most of her journalism through Twitter. The number of references to tweets and other messages on Twitter was almost as if the author thought this information on sourcing would interest the reader. For me, it had the opposite effect, instead coming off as lazy and amateurish (likely because I despise and have become disillusioned by the "news" articles with the headline "Twitter users say..."). Then there was the unnecessary distractions the author included, in particular on COVID and other random political-adjacent comments. I understand the attraction of including mentions of COVID (e.g. someone wearing a mask, meeting over video call) because it was such a big event, but I don't think it ages well – even just a few years on, I find it distracting and uninteresting (I understand an author's desire to make references, but editors should really know better). Then there were miscellaneous political statements, such as explaining why the author would use "community scientist" instead of "citizen scientist" (to then quote a source that used the horrible, no-good, very-bad latter phrase just a few paragraphs later – comes off as a bit condescending). I think the only people who actually care about the distinction spend too much time on Twitter, which brings me back to my initial critique.

But all of that would be dismissible were the scientific content of the book more engaging. I was really hoping for more detail of the technologies and techniques mentioned in the book on the study of bird migration. Instead, there was more description on the people, settings of particular outings, etc. making the book feel shallow. I think the author was going for a style akin to John McPhee, but didn't get the balance of adventure and information right.

I want to finish by clarifying (for the above statements are harsh) that I did not hate the book and harbor no ill-will towards the author. I think this was a great concept for a book and she has the subject-matter expertise to write it, I am just providing my honest opinions.