num_pages: 293
description: In a volume as urgent and eloquent as Rachel Carsons Silent Spring  this bookwinner of the Southern Environmental Law Center's 2016 Reed Environmental Writing Award in the book categoryreveals how the health and well-being of a tiny bird and an ancient crab mirrors our ownWinner of the 2016 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award given by the Society of Environmental Journalists [Cramer] writes . . . 'By the end of this journey I am more in awe than when I began.' Follow her graceful writing for the full 9500 miles and you will share in that awe.Laurence A. Marschall Natural HistoryHer writing is vivid novelistic . . . The resulting book is everything a natural history should be. Living BirdEach year red knots sandpipers weighing no more than a coffee cup fly a near-miraculous 19000 miles from the tip of South America to their nesting grounds in the Arctic and back. Along the way they double their weight by gorging on millions of tiny horseshoe crab eggs. Horseshoe crabs ancient animals that come ashore but once a year are vital to humans their blue blood safeguards our health. Now the rufa red knot newly listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act will likely face extinction in the foreseeable future across its entire range 40 states and 27 countries. The first United States bird listed because global warming imperils its existence it will not be the the red knot is the twenty-first centurys canary in the coal mine. Logging thousands of miles following the knots shivering with the birds out on the snowy tundra tracking them down in bug-infested marshes Cramer vividly portrays whats at stake for millions of shorebirds and hundreds of millions of people living at the sea edge. The Narrow Edge offers an uplifting portrait of the tenacity of tiny birds and of the many people who on the sea edge we all share keep knots flying and offer them safe harbor. Winner of the 2016 National Academies Communications Award for best book that honors the best in science communications. Sponsored by the Keck Futures Initiativea program of the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine with the support of the W.M. Keck Foundation
language: English
title: The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, an Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey
publisher: Yale University Press