Reviewed by Kurt Kamin

When one of our most acclaimed nature writers turns his attention to one of Earth’s most revered animals, the result is a testament to their magnificence. In The Birds of Heaven, Peter Matthiessen has produced an engaging narrative of his recent adventures with ornithologists as they work to study and protect the planet’s 15 crane species. The task is often challenging--—cranes are shy and elusive, highly migratory and capable of soaring to 20,000 feet. Accompanying the leading authorities on crane science and folklore, Matthiessen brings readers into the splendid birds’ most remote habitats in Siberia, Mongolia, China, Tibet, India, Korea, Japan, Australia, South Africa and North America.

Avian enthusiasts will marvel at the author’s ability to detail the evolution and natural history of cranes, and even those who wouldn’t recognize a crane from a stork or a heron will easily grasp their significance and importance. “It moves me that the elegant creature rising in companies from the bars of the Platte on this March morning is the most ancient of all birds, the oldest living bird species on earth,” Matthiessen writes.

The concluding two chapters, set in Nebraska, Wisconsin and Florida, document efforts to understand Earth’s most abundant crane species (the sandhill) and to assist the most rare and endangered (the whooping). The Birds of Heaven succeeds because of Matthiessen’s wonder and eloquence in expressing the beauty, power, and intelligence of cranes, as well as their ability to stir human emotions. “Perhaps more than any other living creature, they evoke the retreating wilderness, the vanishing horizons of clean water, earth, and air upon which their species—and ours, too, though we learn it very late—must ultimately depend for survival.”