• Complain

Kenn Kaufman - A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration

Here you can read online Kenn Kaufman - A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Boston, year: 2019, publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, genre: Science. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Kenn Kaufman A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration
  • Book:
    A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2019
  • City:
    Boston
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

A close look at one season in one key site that reveals the amazing science and magic of spring bird migration, and the perils of human encroachment.
Every spring, billions of birds sweep north, driven by ancient instincts to return to their breeding grounds. This vast parade often goes unnoticed, except in a few places where these small travelers concentrate in large numbers. One such place is along Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio. There, the peak of spring migration is so spectacular that it attracts bird watchers from around the globe, culminating in one of the worlds biggest birding festivals.
Millions of winged migrants pass through the region, some traveling thousands of miles, performing epic feats of endurance and navigating with stunning accuracy. Now climate change threatens to disrupt patterns of migration and the delicate balance between birds, seasons, and habitats. But wind farmspopular as green energy sourcescan be disastrous for birds if built in the wrong places. This is a fascinating and urgent study of the complex issues that affect bird migration.

Kenn Kaufman: author's other books


Who wrote A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Contents

Copyright 2019 by Kenn Kaufman

2019 by Kenn Kaufman

2019 by Kenn Kaufman unless otherwise noted

Kimberly Kaufman Used by permission. All rights reserved.

2018 Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Used by permission of UWMadison AOS Department. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kaufman, Kenn, author.

Title: A season on the wind : inside the world of spring migration / Kenn Kaufman.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018042564 (print) | LCCN 2018052904 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328566768 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328566423 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: BirdsMigrationNorth America. | BirdsEffect of human beings onNorth America. | BirdsConservationNorth America. | BirdsOhioMagee Marsh Wildlife Area. | Magee Marsh Wildlife Area (Ohio)

Classification: LCC QL698.9 (ebook) | LCC QL698.9 .K368 2019 (print) | DDC 598.156/8dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042564

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover photographs Stefano Garau / Getty Images

Author photograph Delores Cole

v1.0319

Prologue
Pilgrims at the Gates of Sunrise

Last night they were on the move.

They had been waiting. Yesterday and days before they had been scattered in a million hiding places, biding their time. For four days, while cold rain pelted down, they had lurked unnoticed, waiting, resting, building their strength. But yesterday the rain had cleared and a south wind had moved in. So after sunset, as the last glow died on the western horizon, they had arisen all at once. They were a multitude of independent invaders, linked by nothing but an intense awareness, taking to the sky, swarming north.

Flying through the night sky, they could see lights below, both near and distant. Vast fields of light marked Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, although the names meant nothing to them. Smaller patches of light glowed everywhere. But these travelers would not have considered navigating by the lights below. They looked up at lights overhead, at the stars arrayed across the black velvet dome of the sky. Those were the reliable guides. Cities, after all, might rise and fall, but the constellations overhead would persist, pointing the way for those who could read the sky.

Most humans on the ground below were utterly unaware of the abundance of life passing overhead. But this springtime movement of migratory birds was nothing new. Birds had flown north across this landscape before there were any electric lights, even before there were scattered campfires. They flew before names like United States and Ohio were first used, and before any calendars called this the second week of May. They flew before the human ideas of weeks and months were invented. The routes and seasons of their travels varied over long spans of time as sea levels rose and fell, as ice sheets advanced and retreated, but the basic movement of migration began millennia ago, its origins lost in the mist of prehistory.

In the last few centuries humans have made sweeping changes to the landscape. There is now less room for wild birds, there are fewer places for them to raise their young, and the northward spring flights are only a shadow of what they once were. But even these diminished flights are still astounding. On peak nights in spring tens of millions of birds, representing hundreds of different species, are moving north all across the continent. During the course of the season migrating birds fly over every square mile of land in North America. Some flying north, some northeast, some northwest, mostly navigating as individuals and not as flocks, they form a living, seething layer of life, far above the ground, for as long as the night lasts.

Most humans are completely oblivious to the feathered parade in the night sky. But some of us are keenly aware. We have been watching weather patterns all season, looking for nights like this with prime conditions. Last night after dark we went online to look at Doppler radar: as small as these birds are, their sheer numbers show up on weather radar, indicating to us when birds are actively moving. Later in the night we went outdoors to listen, and we could hear the occasional flight calls of small birds, drifting down from a thousand feet in the air. And before daylight this morning we headed out to the lakeshore, eager to be there at dawn, to watch for the arriving migrants.

The birds coming from the south, flying a few hundred feet up in the last hours of the night, will see hints of what lies ahead even before first daylight. Below, the velvety blackness of the land is broken only by the isolated lights around farmhouses and small towns and the larger glow from distant cities. But up ahead, moonlight or starlight glints on water, a vast swath of water stretching toward the north: humans call it Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes. The flying birds see it miles before they reach it, and they may start to drop a little lower, as if calculating whether to end their nights journey before coming to the waters edge.

As the glow increases on the eastern horizon, the scene ahead comes into focus. Beyond the solid darkness of land, light reflects on ragged patches of water punctuated by grass and trees and dikes and roads, a broad band of waterlogged land stretching away to both the west and the east. Just beyond that is a darker line of the beach ridge, and past that ridge nothing but miles of open water.

If they had reached this point earlier in the night, the birds would have kept going, powering on across the lake. With dawn approaching, their calculation changes. If its clear weather, the migrants can see a few islands in the lake, and probably the far shorein most places here its less than thirty miles across the lake to the shoreline in Ontario. But if the birds have been flying all night, most of them will stop now, dropping into cover or swooping down to fly parallel to the lake, not across it.

All over eastern North America at this moment, or at least all along the advancing edge of daylight, migrating birds are dropping out of the sky and looking for cover. In most places they are so widely dispersed that theyll go unnoticed. But here, up against the barrier of the lake, numbers build as more and more birds pause and then come down before the waters edge. In the trees, in the thickets, in the marsh edges, the arriving birds pile up. In the immediate vicinity of the lakeshore, so many small birds will concentrate that theyll be impossible to ignore.

Thats why the people are heading to the lakeshore now.

The sun is just climbing above the horizon and cars are arriving in a steady stream, coming north past the woodlots and ponds of the state wildlife area, north along the low causeway that crosses the broad marsh, following the road as it turns left onto the beach ridge and enters the long, narrow parking lot between the woods and the lake. This parking lot will hold hundreds of carsthe adjacent lakeshore used to be a popular swimming beach, when the area was part of a state parkand by 10 A.M. the lot will be filled to capacity, with more vehicles parked in the grassy overflow lot to the east. All of these humans are coming here for just one reason: to witness the swarms of birds now arriving from the south.

We might expect it to look like a mob scene. But it doesnt. In the early morning light, people are scattered out all along the quarter-mile edge between the parking lot and the woodsgroups of two or three or a dozen people, moving slowly, talking quietly, looking intently at the trees. A boardwalk loops through the woods, with entrances near the east and west ends of the parking lot, and some people have gone that way already, vanishing into the trees. The overall feeling is peaceful but intense, quiet but brimming with possibility.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration»

Look at similar books to A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration»

Discussion, reviews of the book A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.