The Feather Quest: A North American Birder's Year / Edition 1

by Pete Dunne

Overview

When a flash of pink was spotted in a cloud of gray gulls over Newburyport, Massachusetts, ten thousand people descended on the town in hopes of seeing a rare Ross's gull from Siberia. Among them were Pete and Linda Dunne, who set off from there on a year-long odyssey. Dunne had poured the most remarkable stories, birds, and characters into this unforgettable book about their once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780395927908
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/30/1999
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

PETE DUNNE forged a bond with nature as a child and has been studying hawks for more than forty years. He has written fifteen books and countless magazine and newspaper columns. He was the founding director of the Cape May Bird Observatory and now serves as New Jersey Audubon’s Birding Ambassador. He lives in Mauricetown, New Jersey.

Editorial Reviews

Toward the beginning of this diary of a birder's ideal year, Dunne ( Hawks in Flight ) describes the sighting of a Ross Gull in Newburyport, Mass., as ``the equivalent of reaching into your pockets for change and coming out with the Hope Diamond.'' The book may be the Hope Diamond of natural history diaries, sparkling throughout with vivid depictions of birds (``a drab, dirt-colored finch that would have to stretch to see the top of a saltshaker''), birding (``looking at birds is a little like viewing art in a gallery'') and the people and places he comes across in his journeys throughout North America, driven by that which ``makes people bind hours of their lives to the horizon.'' In the introduction, Peterson, whose guides have accompanied millions of birders in the field for more than five decades, points out that ``birds can be anything or everything depending on the person. . . . They can even be a bore if you are a bore.'' In The Feathered Quest they are not, because Dunne is not. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Pete Dunne seems destined to be the next dean and spokesperson for American birding--not only through his books Hawks in Flight ( LJ 3/1/88) and Tales of a Low-Rent Birder (Rutgers Univ. Pr., 1986), but as a regular on the birding lecture circuit, positions as director of the prestigious Cape May Bird Observatory and New Jersey Audubon Society, as a nature columnist for various newspapers, and as organizer of the first World Series of Birding. In The Feather Quest , he and his wife live out the birder's dream of following the birds and the seasons around the United States. Such a voyage has not been reported on so mellifluously since Roger Tory Peterson published Wild America in 1935. In prose that reads as smoothly as the best of John McPhee, Dunne muses on birds, on the 22 birding hot spots they visit, on birders as a group, on famous birders they meet, and on the philosophy, spirit, and almost everything that touches the love of birding. Great reading.-- Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. Lib., New York

Library Journal

Pete writes while wife Linda photographs their journeys to places as unlike as Attu, Alaska, and Chiricahua, Arizona. Charming, chatty. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews