Bird-watching is one of the most popular recreational activities in North America — North American birders are estimated to spend as much as $32 billion annually. Many of the world's greatest natural history writers have penned eloquent, informative and profound essays about these alluring creatures. This timeless evocation of our passion for birds features 20 works from such esteemed writers as Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Jonathan Weiner, Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Mabey, and Candace Savage. Included in this diverse selection are excerpts from popular books as well as articles from science and natural history magazines, about birds from all over the planet, and the birders, pishers, twitchers, and listers who love them. Illuminating, entertaining, literary, and intimate, the varied writing reveals the numerous and often unexpected ways in which birds — spiritual messengers, mythic symbols, personal obsessions, even harbingers of environmental catastrophe — connect us to the natural world.

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Richard Cannings is a renowned naturalist, conservationist and lecturer on birds and bird habitats. He works as a consulting biologist assessing endangered species and organizing bird population surveys, and he can be heard on the CBC Radio 1 program BC Almanac as its regular birding expert. He is the author of An Enchantment of Birds, The Rockies: A Natural History, and Birds of Interior BC and the Rockies and is co-author of British Columbia: A Natural History, Birds of Southwestern British Columbia, and the upcoming Birds of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. He lives in Penticton, BC.

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Richard Cannings' profile page