On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth With the Peregrine Falcon
by Alan TennantKnopf, 304 pp., $25
Among migratory birds, none is so extreme in its habits as the peregrine falcon. When diving for prey, it can reach speeds upward of 200 mph. They have also been known to migrate 10,000 miles in a single year. It’s no wonder that the bird’s Latin name – Falco Peregrinus – means wandering falcon, or foreigner. Even ones that hail from Canada wind up as far south as Mexico, the Caribbean, even Argentina.
In other words, trying to track one would be just shy of lunacy. And yet that’s exactly what naturalist Alan Tennant did several years ago. After radio-tagging a peregrine in Texas, Tennant hooked up with a semiretired World War II flight instructor and headed into the wild blue yonder in a rickety Cessna. Their plan: to follow this peregrine (whom they dub Amelia) on her migration north to Canada.
Tennant has returned to the tell the tale, and his book, On the Wing, reads like an apiary version of On the Road, complete with transportation mishaps, big-gulp vistas of the North American continent, and, of course, the musky whiff of manliness unhindered by the working-stiff world.
Tennant is a relative newcomer to falconry, and like any autodidact, knowledge tumbles out of him pell-mell. One moment he’ll be talking about soaring along on 10,000-foot thermals and the next he will describe how a peregrine works its “beak’s sharp tomial points between the victim’s cervical vertebrae in order to sever its spinal cord.” It’s a testament to this book’s raw romanticism that by its close we find this killer rather cute.
This article appears in September 24 • 2004.