Regarding the popularly held idea that bird migration “is all about weather,” right from the first paragraph of the preface to his new book Bird Migration; A New Understanding, Dr. John Rappole cuts straight to the metaphorical chase with a definitive “it’s not.” What it is about is what he then proceeds to explain over the following two hundred seventy three pages in very clearly written prose well-suited to a much wider readership that just professional ornithologists and ecologists.
By re-examining the very frame in which bird migration in examined, and then proceeding to explore the questions that this revised perspective makes possible, Dr. Rappole presents his readers with an explanation that is likely very different from any they may have previously encountered. Yet from this new explanation, many connections to and effects from other aspects of the global environment, particularly when they undergo change, become much more clearly perceived, yielding a greater overall understanding of not only bird migration as a phenomenon in isolation but as one of a myriad of phenomena all held in a intricately interwoven delicate balance.
I stated it earlier but it bears repeating: this is a book that is written to be read by an audience of both professional and amateur ornithologists, naturalists, ecologists, and others who hold related interests. And this is not merely my opinion; Dr. Rappole declares it as clearly in the text as his dismissal of weather being what bird migration is about. Indeed, his very purpose was to make what he presents in it as accessible to a non-specialist audience as he was previously unable to do in his 2013 book The Avian Migrant. Again, not my judgement but his own words.
Quite frankly, I think he succeeds. I therefore hope that this new book finds the wide and diverse audience that spurred it’s author to write it.
