Through active conversations with biologists, conservationists and others around the globe, world-renowned naturalist Scott Weidensaul explores the groundbreaking progress that’s being made for birds.

RECOVERY TAKES FLIGHT:
Saving Birds (and Saving The World)
by Scott Weidensaul
W.W. Norton, Fall 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

As grim as the recognition that we’ve lost nearly 3 billion birds—a third of our avifauna in North America, in the past 50 years—may be, there are many places where the tide is being turned. Globally, at scales hyperlocal or hemispherically immense, work is being driven not just by scientists and conservation professionals but also by average people—ranchers in the West, rice farmers in Colombia, Indigenous Dene communities in Canada, poor rural women in India, isolated Polynesian islanders, rural villages in the Carpathian Mountains, and many more. And because birds are so diverse, so ubiquitous, and with their migrations cover virtually every square mile of the planet’s surface, if we can create a planet that works for birds, it will work for everything else, including us.

*A Pulitzer Prize finalist
*A New York Times bestselling author

Scott Weidensaul is a Pennsylvania-based naturalist and one of the most respected natural history writers in the US. He was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for his book Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds, and has written more than 30 books on birds. He is a contributing editor to Audubon magazine and a columnist for Bird Watcher’s Digest. For the past 20 years Weidensaul has overseen one of the largest owl-migration research projects in the country, and he is one of fewer than 200 licensed hummingbird banders in the world.