Will I love Last of the Curlews?

A beautiful book, written with knowledge and compassion, detailing the astonishing life cycle of the Eskimo Curlew. This was a bird that flew in such huge flocks that a single gunshot would kill 30, and maim more sentencing them to a slower death. It describes their amazing migrations and details their lives as a biography of one male bird.
I knew about the mass slaughter of the American bison and total annihilation of the passenger pigeon not knowing about this other species wiped out by hunting in the US in the 1800s and early 1900. A very powerful portrait.

This is the best book I’ve ever read on what it feels like to be a bird. It takes the form of a novel following the migration and searches for companionship of an Eskimo curlew.

But it isn’t a kid’s novel of entirely anthropomorphized animals, complete with a full complement of human thoughts. Instead, Bodsworth gives a skillfully restrained rendition of what instincts and urges birds might really feel, carefully threading the needle between boring accounts that allow no emotions to birds and fanciful accounts that erroneously attribute all kinds of complex thoughts and calculations to them. 

The migratory and… show more.