On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon (Hardcover)

A naturalist and ecologist, Tennant appears to have a working knowledge of many things rather than being an expert in any one. Here, the author's fascination is with peregrine falcons, including one he named Amelia:

"... from the first what had crystallized Amelia in my heart was her invisible drive, her all-encompassing quest for home ... It was the grail I had sought long ago, on the prairie marshes of my boyhood - a time when I'd had no real home and had longed to join the cranes, join the geese, join every hawk and skittering shorebird whose breast burned with the power of return to the distant harbors I also sought."

Published in 2004, ON THE WING is a narrative of events in the 1980s when Tennant, peripherally involved with a U.S. Army project to identify with radio beacons the migration routes of peregrine falcons, gets infected with the tracking bug big time. Teaming up with an aging, World War II combat flight instructor, George Voss, and the latter's single-engine Cessna Skyhawk, Alan bands a beacon to Amelia and follows her in the air from the Texas coast northward along the spine of the Rockies into Canada before she passes beyond existing airplane landing strips to disappear into her summer home, the Alaskan tundra. Some months later, Tennant, Voss, and the Skyhawk follow three banded falcons - Delgada, Gorda, and Anukiat - south towards their winter home in Central and South America. In between, the author describes time he spent in Alaska observing nesting falcons, coping with the ever-present mosquitos and mud, and avoiding grizzly bears. About the mosquitos, he writes:

"In the mornings ... battalions coated my breakfast cereal. Scraping them off only allowed new hordes to fling themselves onto the path I'd just shaved with my spoon, and eventually I simply shoveled down their hairy ranks along with the underlying oats." Hmm, perhaps the product development division of Kellogg's should take note of a promising new product line.

The narrative achieves considerable charm and intellectual interest as the author occasionally branches out into a variety of subjects: the history of falconry, the hunting practices of polar bears, the dangers posed by the environmental pollutants DDT, paraquat - both defoliants - and polychlorinated biphenyls, the depredations of the evil petrochemical companies in Mexico and Alaska's Artic Slope, and the rise and fall of the Mayan city Xunantunich. And then there are the close calls with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Central American drug runners, and two British RAF Harrier jets.

I'm not awarding five stars because Tennant's fixation ultimately gets tiresome. Alan's mania even takes a toll on his personal life, as he candidly admits. At forty-six years of age, the author has an on-again, off-again relationship with Jennifer, a liaison that suffers because he's not willing to give up gallivanting around the continent and spend time at home. Perhaps a bigger problem is that the author demonstrates very little in the way of a self-deprecating sense of humor; he takes himself and his new hobby way too seriously. By the time Tennat and Voss get to Guatemala, I just wanted to say, "Get a life!"

After reading ON THE WING, or perhaps instead of reading it, I recommend seeing the extraordinary and visually stunning 2001 documentary, WINGED MIGRATION, released on DVD in 2003.