Book Review: Flight of the Godwit - Tracking Epic Shorebird Migrations

With autumn just around the corner, and the chill already setting in the air, one of the telltale signs of the changing season is here.  Birds are on the wing, heading south.  Much of the public attention focuses on songbirds, seen at our backyard feeders, or waterfowl, subject of much interest among hunters.  But of all the seasonal migrants traveling the length of the flyways, few if any have journeys as incredible in their scope as the shorebirds.

In Flight of the Godwit, Bruce Beehler engages in a series of long-distance road trips in pursuit of some of his favorite birds, the sandpipers - a tribe of shorebirds (a larger family that also includes the gulls, puffins, and their kin) consisting of the familiar beach scurriers, such as godwits, curlews, and knots.  From his homebase in Bethesda, Maryland, he seeks to travels the length and breadth of the US and Canada in pursuit of all American sandpipers, from the US-Mexican border through the heartland to the frozen reaches of Alaska.  In doing so, his travels not only emphasize for the reader how tremendously long and difficult these journeys are for birds which, for the most part, are not exceptionally large, but how many jurisdictions and habitats they cover - each a crucial layover stop in their migration, and each in need of some degree of protection to ensure the safe passage of future generations.

Beehler's book is interspersed with concise but detailed sidebar profiles of each North American sandpiper, providing a wealth of information about the species.  I appreciated that these were spread throughout the book, not tucked away into an appendix at the back where they would be more easily overlooked.  Also accompanying the narrative are delightful illustrations by Alan Messer, depicting the various species.

If the book has a weakness, it's that sometimes Beehler's travelog can lose interest for the reader.  There are parts that are fascinating, highlighting the author's commitment to completing the journey, but some stretches can get a little over-detailed and tedious, focused on the minutiae of the trip, the campsites, the meals, the road conditions; you almost get the sense that there are places where he just copied and pasted from his journal.  I suppose part of the problem is - and I base this off my own experiences watching sandpipers in the wild - that while there is a lot of drama in the migratory saga of the shorebirds, once you actually are where they are, there's not a lot of challenge in finding them.  They tend to be (with the exception of some species) in big open spaces where they are easily seen and in decent numbers, so you lose the drama of searching for birds in dense forest, hoping for an elusive warbler to flit into sight (Beehler also wrote a similar book about warblers, North on the Wing, which I have not read yet).

Taken as a whole, I found Flight of the Godwit to be a fun, interesting read on a group of birds which I must admit I've seldom paid too much attention to.  Perhaps because I don't encounter them that often, either in the zoo or in the wild.  Still, next time I'm at the beach and see a sanderling or a dunlin scurry along on the edge of the waves, I know that's a bird that I'm going to feel that much more respect and admiration for, having a new insight into what their incredible annual journey actually consists of.

Flight of the Godwit: Tracking Epic Shorebird Migrations at Good Reads