A Wing and a Prayer
The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
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Stephen Graybill
About this listen
A captivating drama from the frontlines of the race to save birds set against the devastating loss of one third of the avian population.
Three years ago, headlines delivered shocking news: nearly three billion birds in North America have vanished over the past 50 years. No species has been spared, from the most delicate jeweled hummingbirds to scrappy black crows, from a rainbow of warblers to common birds such as owls and sparrows.
In a desperate race against time, scientists, conservationists, birders, wildlife officers, and philanthropists are scrambling to halt the collapse of species with bold, experimental, and sometimes risky rescue missions. High in the mountains of Hawaii, biologists are about to release clouds of laboratory-bred mosquitos in a last-ditch attempt to save Hawaii’s remaining native forest birds. In Central Florida, researchers have found a way to hatch Florida Grasshopper Sparrows in captivity to rebuild a species down to its last two dozen birds. In the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a team is using artificial intelligence to save the California Spotted Owl. In North Carolina, a scientist is experimenting with genomics borrowed from human medicine to bring the long-extinct Passenger Pigeon back to life.
For the past year, veteran journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal traveled more than 25,000 miles across the Americas, chronicling costly experiments, contentious politics, and new technologies to save our beloved birds from the brink of extinction. Through this compelling drama, A Wing and a Prayer offers hope and an urgent call to action: Birds are dying at an unprecedented pace. But there are encouraging breakthroughs across the hemisphere and still time to change course, if we act quickly.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2023 Anders Gyllenhaal and Beverly Gyllenhaal. All rights reserved. (P)2023 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Douglas W. Tallamy's first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of individuals to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation.
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A must read for everybody! Not just nature lovers.
- By Steve Ebert on 06-11-20
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The Bald Eagle
- The Improbable Journey of America's Bird
- By: Jack E. Davis
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you’re not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as “majestic” and “noble,” yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies.
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I thought the book would be about the bald eagle
- By An Amazon Buyer on 10-25-22
By: Jack E. Davis
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Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman
- Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland
- By: Miriam Horn
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Many of the men and women doing today's most consequential environmental work - restoring America's grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans - would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land - the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers, and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth.
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great stories
- By GMMT on 05-15-18
By: Miriam Horn
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The Thing with Feathers
- The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human
- By: Noah Strycker
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, and other mysteries.
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Interesting book, terrible reader
- By MGM123 on 03-16-18
By: Noah Strycker
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The Beak of the Finch
- A Story of Evolution in Our Time
- By: Jonathan Weiner
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Rosemary and Peter Grant and those assisting them have spend 20 years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos, studying natural selection. They recognize each individual bird on the island, when there are 400 at the time of the author's visit or when there are over a thousand. They have observed about 20 generations of finches - continuously.Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.
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Fascinating in-depth look at evolution in action
- By Philip on 05-15-11
By: Jonathan Weiner
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Coyote America
- A Natural and Supernatural History
- By: Dan Flores
- Narrated by: Elijah Alexander
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards and its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse.
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Very Enjoyable Book, Subject Matter, and Reader
- By John Townsend on 03-17-17
By: Dan Flores
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The End of Ice
- Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption
- By: Dahr Jamail
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis - from Alaska to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest - in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.
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Dealing with the Ultimate Climate Change Question
- By red_dog on 02-03-19
By: Dahr Jamail
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The Galápagos
- A Natural History
- By: Henry Nicholls
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The Galapagos were once known to the sailors and pirates who encountered them as Las Encantadas: the enchanted islands, home to exotic creatures and dramatic volcanic scenery. In The Galapagos, science writer Henry Nicholls offers a lively natural and human history of the archipelago, charting its evolution from deserted wilderness to scientific resource (made famous by Charles Darwin) and global ecotourism hot spot.
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Thought-Provoking
- By Jean on 10-23-18
By: Henry Nicholls
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Windfall
- The Booming Business of Global Warming
- By: McKenzie Funk
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Global warming's physical impacts can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk travels to two dozen countries to profile entrepreneurial people who see a potential windfall in each of these forces. The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland - and for the man-made snow trade. Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies as well as for fund managers backing south Sudanese warlords who control local farmland.
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unintended windfalls mixed with obvious perils
- By Andy on 02-09-14
By: McKenzie Funk
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The Soil Will Save Us
- How Scientists, Farmers, and Ranchers Are Tending the Soil to Reverse Global Warming
- By: Kristin Ohlson
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming. Her discoveries and vivid storytelling will revolutionize the way we think about our food, our landscapes, our plants, and our relationship to Earth.
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Rambling, mile wide, inch deep treatment of a subject
- By Charles Phillips on 10-17-18
By: Kristin Ohlson
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The Humane Economy
- How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals
- By: Wayne Pacelle
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A major new exploration of the economics of animal exploitation and a practical road map for how we can use the marketplace to promote the welfare of all living creatures from the renowned animal-rights advocate Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States and New York Times best-selling author of The Bond.
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For all lovers of animals--even the most sensitive
- By monique on 05-01-16
By: Wayne Pacelle
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Farmageddon
- The True Cost of Cheap Meat
- By: Philip Lymbery, Isabel Oakeshott
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Farm animals have been disappearing from our fields as the production of food has become a global industry. We no longer know for certain what is entering the food chain and what we are eating - as the UK horsemeat scandal demonstrated. We are reaching a tipping point as the farming revolution threatens our countryside, health, and the quality of our food wherever we live in the world.
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Excellent insight of industrial farming
- By Grazyna on 04-19-14
By: Philip Lymbery, and others
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The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
- A New History of a Lost World
- By: Steve Brusatte
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In this stunning narrative spanning more than 200 million years, Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field - discovering 10 new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork - masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy.
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"The Rise of the Scientists Who Study Dinosaurs"
- By Daniel Powell on 09-16-18
By: Steve Brusatte
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What listeners say about A Wing and a Prayer
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- rafojas
- 03-30-24
Great Birder Book
I am, at best, a very amateur Birder. I am blessed to live in an area with a multitude of birds. And I have a multitude of birds that readily come to my birdfeeder and deck. Several years ago I was ecstatic to find out there was a bald eagle nest on my property. Two years ago I found out there was a golden eagle nest not far from the corner of my property.. This book was delightful, it was easy to tell that the authors share my love of wildlife and the outdoors and specifically birds. All of that came through.
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- K. Jones
- 03-07-24
Save the birds to save ourselves!
Birds are an important part of the wild. l learned how important they are in this book. Learn that by saving the birds we indirectly save other animals, insects, plants and ultimately the ecosystem.
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- J. R.
- 03-06-24
Outstanding
The sad but necessary truth about our impact on the environment. I wish more humans cared about the rest of the Earth's inhabitants.
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- Granny
- 06-06-23
Everyone should listen/read this book
Outstanding piece of non-fiction! Even tho I live in Raleigh (surrounded by birds) and backpack extensively, I probably would not have taken this up were it not for my book club. So very pleased it was suggested and I plan to gift and/or recommend it to others. 5 stars!
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14 people found this helpful
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- David in Mississippi
- 04-04-24
Very Surprising Information About BIRDS in the USA
I didn't know what to expect when I began this book, but I was very pleasantly surprised by the content.
The authors are obviously experts in knowledge of birds in America, and they have done a masterful job of compiling their knowledge into a book EVERYONE NEEDS TO HEAR/READ!
The content itself, while very well written, is at times uplifting, at times depressing, and at times inspiring in that it will get under your skin and make you want to shout, "What can I DO about this?"
I liked this book so much, I bought a hardback version of it as a gift for a family friend who is a "birder."
This book is not nearly as extensive (or as depressing) as Farley Mowat's "Sea of Slaughter" (which you should read if you have not yet done so), but it is in the same vein, comparing the population of birds today with decades ago, and giving us a very frightening look into the future if we don't do something.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Joan
- 02-26-24
What a wonderful book!!!
I got a suggested free phone app and can hardly wait for daylight to begin looking for birds in my area. What fun.
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- pruna andres
- 11-17-23
Awesome
This is an entertaining and informative book on birds. If you want to become a birder, this is it.
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8 people found this helpful
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- tetrahymena
- 04-01-24
A Silent Spring for this generation.
Just as Silent Spring awakened our consciousness to the dangers of insecticides and other biological pollutants, A Wing and A Prayer strives to open our minds to the loss of biodiversity through the lens of our lost birds. Through climate change, habitat loss, and polluted and degraded resources, we have been losing our birds at an astounding rate. Our avian companions are deeply interlinked with the rest of nature, and as we lose them, we lessen our own chances for survival.
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- Chaco
- 09-22-24
Up to date conservation
A great update to many conservation efforts. Also a good place to begin to understand bird conservation.
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- adel
- 12-26-23
Memoir disguised as nature
Very poor fit using marine creatures to illustrate authors emotional goulash. Personally I objected to have wonders of nature equated/degraded by comparison to human relationship issues.
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24 people found this helpful