This book is about observing and studying Swallow-tailed Kites. But it is more than that too. It describes the motivation to find something rare and magnificent and to learn its haunts and lifestyle, even if a lot of time, money and effort are involved. ( )

From Publishers Weekly
Environmentalist literature often focuses on some charismatic species as an emblem of threatened nature, but seldom with the infatuation hinted at in this title. Writer and conservationist Cerulean (Florida Wildlife Viewing Guide) has spent years researching the graceful raptor and offers a rundown of its diet, mating habits and epic migratory itinerary while deploring the destruction of its habitat by agribusiness and sprawl. But the book owes less to ecology than it does to older romantic conceptions of nature as a mirror of the writer's soul. The bird thus prompts Cerulean's musings on her childhood memories, her psychotherapeutic history, her "hunger for intimacy" and her guilt over her and her forebears' environmental sins, and it becomes a living totem through which she returns to an authentic religion of nature worship after the abstractions of Christianity. Cerulean veers close to out-and-out fetishism, rhapsodizing "the wild desire that strained my body toward that awesome bird" and left her "ready to explode with a primitive, physical longing" that "felt like coupling, like making the baby." Overshadowed by its symbolic role as spiritual mentor or ecstatic trigger, the reality and particularism of the bird itself recedes. (Mar.)
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From Booklist
Swallow-tailed kites are beautiful, scissor-tailed raptors, whose flight is so buoyant and effortless that they resemble the paper kites for which they are named. Once found from Minnesota to Texas, and Maine to Florida, their numbers declined alarmingly with the arrival of European settlers and their concurrent altering of the natural landscape. Cerulean's first sighting of a kite almost caused her to overturn her canoe, and she knew she had just encountered something essential that connected her to the wilderness. In a lovely series of essays, Cerulean explores the hunger for intimacy, the unnameable longing, that can cause the connection with nature that she found with the kite but can also cause the destruction of the very thing one desires. As she writes of working with field biologists as they study the kites, and of the natural history of kites, she weaves reminiscences of her past, of how she became fascinated with nature, and of her personal evolution. This lyrical book belongs in all libraries where readers demand environmental writing. Nancy Bent
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