Study is such fun. Yesterday’s Wings Big Year reading unearthed a technical term I’d kind of known about but never appreciated. For migratory birds – creatures who breed in one place and then regularly fly somewhere else, often far away, for the other half of the year – a “flyway” is its annual path on a map of the globe.
This is most relevant for me. If I do indeed launch a special project next year on cranes, which mostly migrate, here are the words of advice of Harry Saddler (author of the terrific “The Eastern Curlew: The Extraordinary Life of a Migratory Bird”): “The idea of writing a book about migration without travelling along the migration route is inconceivable…”
That simple phrase might not strike you as particularly profound but it hit me like a hammer.