Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
"Cranes are ubiquitous in the earliest legends of the world's peoples, where they often figure as sentinels of heaven and omens of longevity and good fortune. For their great beauty and imposing size - they are the largest of all flying birds on earth - they are held near-sacred in many lands. Their broad wilderness habitat requirements make them "umbrella species": protecting them ensures that other creatures and the earth and water of the ecosystem are also protected. In addition, the enormous spans of cranes' migrations have encouraged international conservation efforts." "In The Birds of Heaven, Peter Matthiessen chronicles his many journeys in search of the world's fifteen species of cranes. From the vast taiga of Siberia's Amur basin and the Mongolian steppe, breeding grounds for the glorious red-crowned and white-naped cranes, his travels take him to India, Bhutan, China, Japan, and Korea, then on to Australia, Africa, and western Europe (where the native crane is being encouraged to return), and finally to Wisconsin, Nebraska, the Gulf Coast, and Florida, where ingenious efforts are under way to establish a nonmigratory population of the rare whooping crane. He is accompanied by erudite and passionate ornithologists and "craniacs," along with many fascinating regional people, from Mongolian nomads to Gujarati nawabs. Through their eyes as well as his own, he portrays the astonishingly tenacious cranes' struggles to survive in a rapidly developing world in which man is leaving less and less place for other creatures. He also captures the deep loss to humankind should these majestic creatures - their majesty illuminated by Robert Bateman's eloquent renderings - be permitted to disappear."--BOOK JACKET.
Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
Previews available in: English
Showing 2 featured editions. View all 2 editions?
Edition | Availability |
---|---|
1
The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes
December 20, 2001, North Point Press
in English
0374199442 9780374199449
|
aaaa
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
2
The Birds of Heaven: travels with cranes
2001, North Point Press
in English
- 1st ed.
0374199442 9780374199449
|
cccc
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
Book Details
First Sentence
"On a rare clear morning-the first day of summer 1992-flying across the Bering Strait from the Yukon delta toward the Diomede Islands and the Chukotskiy Peninsula of Siberia, I imagine the gray sun-silvered strait as seen from on high by a migrating crane, more particularly, by the golden eye of the Crane from the East,, as the lesser sandhill crane of North America is known to traditional peoples on its westernmost breeding territory in Siberia."
ID Numbers
Links outside Open Library
Community Reviews (0)
Feedback?History
- Created April 29, 2008
- 10 revisions
Wikipedia citation
×CloseCopy and paste this code into your Wikipedia page. Need help?
June 30, 2017 | Edited by MARC Bot | associate with work |
August 11, 2011 | Edited by ImportBot | add ia_box_id to scanned books |
April 5, 2011 | Edited by ImportBot | Found a matching Internet Archive item record |
August 5, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |