The View From Great Gull

Very good hardcover in good+ dust jacket.  Ex library.  Creases and scratches on front cover of DJ.  Library sticker on spine/front of DJ.  Card pocket on ffp.

"The perpetual ebb and flow of birds" dominates Michael Harwood's journal of his summer at Great Gull Island, the American Museum of Natural History research station just one hundred miles from Manhattan, and nine miles from New London, Connecticut.  During the breeding season Harwood volunteered to help perform the nitty-gritty labor that bird research requires:  counting and tagging; recording numbers of eggs; up-rooting beach grass to make more space for nesting.  But he soon found himself more deeply involved.  For him the island became a microcosm of larger concerns: the fragility of survival, the mystery of behavior, the persistence of natural forces beyond human's domain.  The diary of his summer, which interweaves the long and varied history of the island with fascinating research, is much a study of homo sapiens as of the birds themselves.