Product Description

A New York Times Bestseller

Film rights optioned by Robert Redford

Alan Tennant recounts his all-out, unprecedented effort to radio-track the transcontinental migration of the peregrine falcon. Tennant's partner in falcon-chasing is George Vose, a septuagenarian World War II pilot. As the two men nearly lose their lives and run afoul of the law in the race to keep the birds in view and the Cessna in the air, Tennant renders with gorgeous precision the landscape and wildlife they pass on the way.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2957071 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-02
• Format: Large Print
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 640 pages

Amazon.com Review
On a mission to map the migration of the peregrine falcon, Alan Tennant and his friend George Vose logged thousands of miles in a rattletrap Cessna. On the Wing is as much quest narrative as nature book, and the tale of the two men's voyage is unforgettable. At their first meeting, when Tennant suggested that they track a radio-tagged falcon by air, WWII vet Vose assessed naturalist Tennant with a keen eye. "Aviation takes intestinal fortitude, Mister. You were pretty green up there today. Calm air, too." Nevertheless, Tennant convinced the gruff pilot that the project was worthy, and they set off, soaring north over the dunes of Gulf Coast barrier islands. The falcon was just a beeping signal to them most of the time, but they became obsessed with its movements. In the small cockpit, they shared extremes of disappointment and elation as they dealt with bad weather, lost signals, run-ins with the Army, and equipment problems. They ended up posing as highway patrol officers, crossing international borders, and risking their lives in order to keep on the track of their wayward subject. Threaded into the funny and moving adventure story, Tennant scatters casual snippets of science--peregrine falcon biology, pesticide toxicology, and the little-understood fact of animal migration itself. The facts never get in the way of the fun, though--this is real Wild Kingdom action. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly
Naturalist Tennant (The Guadalupe Mountains of Texas) describes his efforts to trail peregrine falcons on their epic migratory flights from the Caribbean to the Arctic in a detailed, impassioned account that's part nature study and part gonzo travelogue. After radio-tagging a young peregrine off the coast of Texas, Tennant teams up with George Vose, a former WWII combat flight instructor, to follow the bird on its spring migration north. Plenty of excitement—run-ins with Canadian Mounties, trouble with Vose's battered plane—follows as the men track their "guiding angel," the bird they name Amelia. After a trip to the peregrine's Alaskan breeding grounds, Tennant and Vose follow three new peregrines on the fall migration down the coast of Mexico and Central America, where their adventures include going into a free-fall over the Caribbean Ocean and being mistaken for DEA agents. Tennant pauses to consider nearly every creature he encounters along the way, from polar bear to insect, describing its connection to the land, and, in the inevitable bittersweet turn, revealing the environmental degradation that threatens its survival. With a nature-lover's deep concern rather than an ideologue's rhetoric, Tennant emphasizes the connection between man and beast, reflecting as well on his own need for migration and adventure. 8-page color insert not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Forty years ago, North America's peregrine falcons lay at extinction's door. Many had been shot out of the sky by eager hunters, but many more had been poisoned by pesticides in the food chain, condemned, as the hawk-obsessed British writer J.A. Baker memorably put it, to "die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals."

Thanks to the leadership of the Peregrine Fund and other conservation groups, Falco peregrinus and its kindred birds of prey have been pulled from the edge of oblivion. Yet the stay of execution may only be temporary, Alan Tennant suggests in his spirited eco-memoir On the Wing. DDT has long been banned in America, thanks in part to Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, but it is plentiful in the raptors' Central American wintering grounds, "part of the agricultural equipment of nearly every rural village between Tamaulipas and Venezuela." Things are no better on the northernmost extremes of the raptors' habitat, where massive concentrations of organochlorines -- in, among other settings, human breast milk -- mark civilization's progress in the Arctic.

As his book opens, in the mid-1980s, we find Tennant working as a volunteer falcon watcher on the Texas barrier islands. There he ran smack into the might of the U.S. Army, which, for mysterious reasons, bore much of the cost of the falcon-migration study in which he was participating. We can only imagine the Strangelovian purposes behind the Army's interest in such things, but whatever the case, Tennant quickly moved on, having liberated some choice radio-telemetry equipment with which to track a transmitter-carrying falcon to the Arctic.

It will not be the only crime he commits in these pages, aided and abetted by a World War II veteran aviator named George Vose, with whom he formed a mutual egging-on and falcon-chasing society, Tennant urging Vose to "go . . . where no one's ever gone," Vose growling by way of reply, "Ever known how to go."

The why of the transcontinental journey the two concoct is simple: Bird migration will forever remain a mystery unless we know where the birds go and what they do when they get there. For that we need good on-the-ground (or, in this case, in-the-air) data, and lots of it, all of which On the Wing elegantly delivers.

The hows form the heart of Tennant and Vose's ensuing adventures, which took them north across Canada -- illegally -- to the Arctic in a battered airplane that Tennant repeatedly likens to the plastic basket in which supermarket strawberries are sold. The description is apt, save that strawberry baskets don't go auguring into mountainsides, one of the many occupational hazards Tennant endured -- and describes -- so that we lesser birdwatchers do not have to.

The world of raptors, Tennant allows at the outset, is Hobbesian; certainly the lives of the pigeons and kittiwakes and starlings they encounter are short and come to a nasty end. Tennant's descriptions of raptor kills sometimes veer into the territory of those eco-snuff films on which cable channels seem to thrive: A shark finds its seal, a lion its wildebeest, and in a spray of blood we see natural selection at work.

So it was when, for instance, Tennant spotted a little falcon attacking three much larger teal in the Big Bend country of Texas. "They were right above me as the peregrine came up on them, and beneath the hawk's rippling flanks I could see it unsheathe its hidden yellow feet and swing them forward, dropping the long hind-talons that opened like a Barlow knife to rake a silent explosion of feathers from the last teal's back."

Such images are not for the squeamish. Little about nature is. But there are many rewards for readers who take such things as they come. One prize lies at the end of the book, when, somewhere over Mexico, Tennant and Vose traverse the storied "river of raptors" that joins the Arctic to the equator and points south, "millions of northern migrants making their way down the continent's central migration corridor."

It's a magnificent moment, one of many in what is, all in all, a fine vicarious experience for any reader with a liking for either birds of prey or death-defying stunts. The conceit of the journey in search of animals, whether a particular species or an entire menagerie, has informed much of the best nature writing of our time: Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, Robert Michael Pyle's Chasing Monarchs, Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway, Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years, to name just a few. On the Wing fits neatly on the shelf next to these noteworthy books. It should hold up just as well as they in the coming years, even if all of us should hope for a happier ending than what, Tennant hints, really awaits our birds of prey -- and with them the rest of our world.

Reviewed by Gregory McNamee
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Following a Falcon Will Take Your Breath Away
I remember as a child in the sixties poring through the Time-Life book on the animal kingdom. It had this one memorable illustration of all the major species in a big race to show how fast each of them ran, swam and flew against each other. Far ahead of anything else in nature was the peregrine falcon. From that distinct memory, I picked up this book to see why anyone would be foolish enough to try to track one. Author and naturalist Alan Tennant has taken on the challenge and come up with one of the most interesting non-fiction books I've read all year. The peregrine falcon would seem elusive. After all, when diving for prey, it can reach speeds upward of 200 mph, and they can migrate 10,000 miles in a single year, traversing from Canada to as far as Argentina. But Tennant decided to radio-tag one, whom he appropriately dubs Amelia on her migration from Texas to Canada. What ensues, as documented in this journal, is unexpected, unique and extraordinary.

This is no simple Audubon Society-style study. Blend Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and Ché Guevera's "The Motorcycle Diaries", cross-breed them with "Winged Migration", and you get some sense of the spell this book casts. Of course, Tennant has a cantankerous sidekick, George Vose, a septuagenarian World War II flight instructor who trusts his instincts more than his flight instruments. Clearly he provides the yang to Tennant's yin. They have life-endangering adventures, astounding views of North America from far above and naturally, the strong pull of male bonding to make it through their journey. Tennant has obviously picked up a lot of information on falconry, which he shares generously, but he also has a true gift of describing the soaring epiphanies that he and Vose experienced flying in their aged Cessna. Just like being in the cockpit with Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, the reader gets transported to a contained world where exhilaration mixes unexpectedly with dread. The result is a breathtaking book, a needed panacea for anyone who is tiring of the political, election-timed tomes filling the shelves of your bookstore.

One of the All-Time Most Amazing Adventures
This would be an incredible work of fiction. The fact that these guys really did this stuff is just unbelievable. Best of all, Alan Tennant is a writer who knows how to weave his story into the natural world, and vice versa. It doesn't matter whether you're into birds, or airplanes, or whatever- this is just a great read. It's funny, it's poignant, it's ridiculous, it's deeply informative. Truly one of the best and most entertaining books I've read in a long, long time.

A Romantic, Scientific Quest
_Falco Peregrinus_ is the Latin name for the peregrine falcon. The name means "wandering falcon," and the name fits. It has breeding grounds in Alaska, and swoops down as far even as Argentina to follow the sunlight, which powers the plants which after other links turn into the birds on which the falcon feeds. You wouldn't expect Alan Tennant to be to particularly interested in the travels of falcons; after all, he's a snake man, have published several field guides to snakes in different regions of America. But as is shown in his book, _On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon_ (Knopf), Tennant has an unstoppable and unrestrained curiosity. He has had his share of funny occurrences, dangerous moments, and inexplicable joys in the quest for following his falcons, a quest that was of minor research significance, relentless discomfort, and intermittent life-threatening peril. His lovely account of having to do a senseless task because he simply had to will convince the reader of the emotional sense of such an effort; his book gives as well a picture of falcon life and larger ecological concerns, and it never misses a chance to describe the many eccentric humans Tennant gets to meet.

The book opens in the mid-1980s when Tennant was watching falcons on the barrier islands of Texas. He wanted to go with them. He hooked up with George Vose, a World War II flight instructor who has experience in tracking birds but no particular love of it. Vose plays Tennant's Sancho Panza, an irritable septuagenarian pilot with a rickety Cessna who loves flying. Tennant hated flying (and given the scrapes and scares that Vose's plane gave him, with good reason). The two adventurers don't get much of a chance actually to see their falcons. They are following just radio blips; losing the blips is a disaster fraught with worry, and regaining them, sometimes after days or weeks of silence, is a joy. There is plenty of wildlife in Tennant's book, but it is a pleasure to read about how these two became friends. In contrast, Tennant writes just as clearly and movingly about how his obsession ruins his relationship with his smart and sensible girlfriend Jennifer.

The adventures of Tennant and Vose chasing radio beacons take them back and forth across America into Canada for the summer trek and into Mexico and Belize for the winter. Every bit of bad weather the intrepid birds go through has to be endured by the pilots as well. There is plenty to learn about how evolution has shaped birds in different ways for success. In contrast to the falcons, for instance, hawks cannot feed on birds on the wing since they hunt mice, frogs, and insects. This means that they have to economize on their migrations, and stick to flying over land, where they can catch free rides on thermals, a tactic falcons do not use. Tennant and Vose have to negotiate with Canadian customs to cross into Canadian airspace, but because they would lose their falcon while they waited for clearance, Tennant lies to Vose and says their request was granted. They track the falcon successfully, but their illegal entry gets them into trouble with the Mounties later. Almost everywhere they go, they are assumed to be running drugs; it is a far more credible explanation than can be provided when Tennant insists he is engaged in the foolery of hunting falcon radio beacons. They are more than once intimidated by men with guns who are convinced they are drug-runners or spies with electronic surveillance gear. The inimical forces of nature are just as problematic, from mosquitoes to bears. Along the way, the genial guide Tennant gets to write about such things as mammoths and the memorial at the crash site of Will Rogers and Wiley Post. Tennant reflects, a little sadly, that as eccentric as their quest might have been, it would now be even more unnecessary; falcons are tracked by satellite. None of those researchers with their eyes on their satellite monitors, however, is ever going to be able to produce as romantic and entertaining a volume as this one.