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Flight Paths

How the Mystery of Bird Migration Was Solved

Rebecca Heisman

Description

Flight Paths is the never-before-told story of how a group of migration-obsessed scientists engaged nearly every branch of science to understand bird migration – from where and when they take off to their flight paths and behaviors, their destinations and the challenges they encounter getting there.

Uniting curious minds from across generations, continents and disciplines, Rebecca Heisman traces the development of each technique used for tracking migratory birds, from the first attempts to mark individual birds to the cutting-edge technology that lets ornithologists trace where a bird has been, based on unique DNA markers. Along the way, she touches on the biggest technological breakthroughs of modern science and reveals the almost-forgotten stories of the scientists who harnessed these inventions in service of furthering our understanding of nature (and their personal obsession with birds).