Wild Bird Book Recommendations
Migration

FAVORITE! Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds
by Scott Weidensaul
Twice a year an estimated 5 billion birds migrate between a summer and a winter habitat.Living on the Wind travels with the birds, offering details of some specific species and general clues about the process of migration. It's a bird-watcher's dream world tour.

FAVORITE! Gatherings of Angels: The Ecology of Migrating Birds
by Kenneth P. Able
The migration of birds has for centuries amazed and confounded onlookers. Those fortunate enough to have witnessed the skies filling with these intrepid travelers wonder, how do they find their way to their destination? How do they withstand the dangers and rigors of their long-distance flight? Gatherings of Angels offers firsthand accounts by leading experts in avian migration who convey not only the biology but also a sense of the beauty and excitement that attend this most extraordinary of natural spectacles.

The Flight of the Red KnotKnot : A Natural History Account of a Small Bird's Annual Migration from the Arctic Circle to the Tip of South America and Back
by Brian Harrington, Charles Flowers
The epic subtitle only hints at the amazing scope of this story. The subject is the migration of a species of sandpiper, known as the red knot for its smoked salmon breeding coloration. These birds mass in the tens of thousands on New Jersey's Delaware Bay beaches in late May, a pit stop between Brazil and Hudson Bay, one leg of their immense journey. Their short New Jersey sojourn indicates both the wonder of their stamina and the fragility of the whole elaborately evolved enterprise, for they use this stop to consume a prodigious number--as many as 135,000--of tiny horseshoe crab eggs. Yet this bit of New Jersey shore is a vital link that makes the completion of the trip possible. An astonishing and important story.

How Birds Migrate
by Paul Kerlinger
Excellent discussion of the mysteries of migration. Each chapters here focuses on a single aspect of migration, revealing the unusual complexity underlying questions about bird migration processes.

Where Have All the Birds Gone? Essays on the Biology and Conservation of Birds That Migrate to the American Tropics
by John Terborgh
Why are tropical migrant species disappearing from our forests? Can we save the birds that are left? Terborgh takes a more comprehensive view of migratory birds than is usual--by asking how they spend their lives during the half-year they reside in the tropics.

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