Book Review |
Peregrine Quest |
Peregrine Quest: From a Naturalist’s Field Sketchbook
by Clayton White
(Western Sporting Publications)
Clayton White has devoted his life’s work to the pigeon’s nemesis, the
Peregrine Falcon. In
Peregrine Quest,
he narrates the life and also tells us more about the species than any
recent book.
Peregrine Quest
ranges in time from the 1960’s to the present, and geographically from the
Lower 48 states to the Arctic,
Central Asia,
South America,
Australia, and the South Seas. It is a fascinating mixture of
autobiography, anecdote, observation, and up-to-date scientific
information. I have often said of myself that
birds of prey have
led me to places and people I would otherwise not have known; the
peregrine has done the same for Clayton White. As he says, “For me,
devotion to the study of a species of bird and the involvement of students
and family in that study, and the love of it, has made my life meaningful.”
It was a life of adventure, boating on Arctic rivers, camping amid
grizzlies and wolverines, climbing cliffs all over the world. It was also
one devoted to the
conservation of birds of prey, assessing and even discovering rare
populations and subspecies. One of the delights of the book, at least to
this raptor-obsessed reader, is its depiction in illustration and word of
the many odd peregrines around the world: the black juveniles of the
Aleutians, the
“pointy-headed” birds of Fiji, the pale desert peregrines of Asia, and the
young tundrius peregrines of the Arctic that resemble Lanner Falcons.
White has seen and studied them all on their home grounds.
He is refreshingly skeptical about some fashionable shibboleths, such as
restoring environments to their “original” state. Of
Amchitka Island he
says: “this suggests that at some specific spot in time there is a final
climax or some sort of equilibrium that the environment reaches -- were
they trying to return conditions to that mythical point? As one would
expect, the efforts on Amchitka had not ‘restored’ anything, but have
simply created a new environment. At what historical point were
conditions ‘original,’ and who makes the judgment?” Peregrine Quest is a celebration of a mythic bird and a testimony to a well-lived life, a life of passion in service to an ideal. As he says: “The real quest is in trying to understand stewardship of all landscapes, find out how to live in it, and then do it.”
This is a review by
Stephen J. Bodio in the Winter 2009 issue of
Living Bird,
the journal of the
Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Clayton White, PhD, is the
recently-retired chairman of the Biology Dept. at
Brigham Young University, and is a member and former officer of the
Utah Ornithological Society. |
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