Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly Book

Sue Halpern, a gifted student of the natural world, has a knowing passion for butterflies--"not love, exactly, offered suddenly, but a similar quickening of heart and desire ... tugging on my imagination as if it were a loose sleeve." In Four Wings and a Prayer, that passion takes flight in quest of the monarch, a species of butterfly suddenly much in the news. In the company of freelance biologist Bill Calvert, ecologist Homero Aridjis, and other scientists and activists, Halpern travels into the highlands of Michoacan, Mexico, to which monarchs born east of the Rocky Mountains migrate each autumn, flying as much as 200 miles a day to get there before the onset of the highland winter. There she ponders the complexities of the monarch's life--after all, she writes, "how did the monarch butterflies from the eastern United States and Canada, millions of them, end up every year in the same unlikely spot, a remote and largely inhospitable fifty acres of oyamelis pine forest?"--and the unfortunate events that have felled monarchs by the untold millions in recent years, including the destruction of habitat and climate change. Halpern's enthusiasm for Lepidoptera is catching, and her graceful advocacy of the monarch should inspire renewed concern for their well-being in the world. --Gregory McNamee Read More

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  • Product Description

    Every autumn, the monarch butterflies east of the Rockies migrate from as far north as Canada to Mexico. Memory is not their guide â?? no one butterfly makes the round trip â?? but each year somehow find their way to the same fifty acres of forest on the high slopes of Mexicoâ??s Neovolcanic Mountains, and then make the return trip in the spring.

    In Four Wings and a Prayer, Sue Halpern sets off on an adventure to delve into the secrets behind this extraordinary phenomenon. She visits scientists and butterfly lovers across the country, offering a keenly observed portrait of the monarchsâ?? migration and of the people for whom they have become a glorious obsession. Combining science, memoir, and travel writing, Four Wings and a Prayer is an absorbing travelogue and a fascinating meditation on a profound mystery of the natural world.


    From the Trade Paperback edition.

  • 037540208X
  • 9780375402081
  • Sue Halpern
  • 1 May 2001
  • Pantheon Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 224
  • 1
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