cover image Season at the Point: The Birds and Birders of Cape May

Season at the Point: The Birds and Birders of Cape May

Jack Connor. Grove/Atlantic, $21.95 (290pp) ISBN 978-0-87113-456-1

The season is fall, the players are counters and banders and the field is the sky at Cape May. Birders know that this area at the southernmost tip of New Jersey is a natural funnel for tens of thousands of migrating raptors and shorebirds. Now even non-birders can enjoy a fall migration from the Cape in this movable feast of amateur field ornithology--observing mostly hawks and falcons--captured by Connor ( The Complete Birder ) in hundreds of crisp moments of individual discovery. Exceptions to the focus on raptors include the last known sighting of the Bachman's warbler, North America's rarest songbird. This is hunkered-down-in-the-blind reporting from a fine naturalist writer who seems able to make a sunset linger while he and his readers strain to see the last silhouetted shape in the winter sky at the Point. (July)