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Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-57131-239-6
Pages: 266
Publish Date: Dec, 2001
Genre: Nonfiction
A Wing in the Door
Adventures with a Red-Tailed Hawk
BY Peri Phillips McQuay
Peri McQuay tells of her extraordinary experiences with a two-year-old red-tailed hawk that was brought to her rural home to be released back to the wild. The hawk, taken from its nest when very young to be trained for falconry, was human-imprinted and not ready to return to wild ways. Sometimes a fractious pet (terrorizing the household cats, seizing the garden hose as if it were a snake) and sometimes a graceful, wholly”other" creature, the bird captivates the McQuay family.
Written in poetically beautiful prose, this is an inspiring, true story of adventure and growth, recording the difficulties and triumphs surrounding the survival of a human-imprinted hawk learning to live in freedom. McQuay writes:”It was only with the coming of Merak, the human-imprinted, red-tailed hawk, that I was challenged to confront the truths of wild living in a way that I could never have understood in my dreams."
“She is a skilled writer who can apply her precise and confident prose with equal success to beauty or violence.... McQuay knows her land, knows its inhabitants, both plant and the animal, like a first language. Because of this she has written a compelling tale about wild places and wild and half-wild creatures and what it feels like to be around them that rings with authenticity.”
—Nicols Fox, Washington Post Book World“In the style of Jane Goodall and other animal behaviourists, there's a magnificent tenderness in these narratives—emphatically not to be confused with sentamentality.”
—Toronto Globe and Mail"A gentle story, at times comical, always enjoyable.... The author is a fine, lyrical writer . . . able to make us feel as though we're actually watching the young hawk stumble through her education in the ways of the wild”
—Booklist"An engaging account of her lengthy relationship with the ungainly, needy red-tailed hawk named Merak.”
—Orion“McQuay's compassionate curiosity makes her a fine narrator for this close encounter with the normally elusive, if nearly ubiquitous, Red-tailed Hawk. She candidly relates the thoughtful speculation and occasional bafflement that the hawk's behavior would elicit in any caring observer——inviting the readers to join her in peering out through the open door of her own daily life, into the alien world of a predatory bird.”
—Sarah Juniper Rabkin, University of California, Santa Cruz, ISLE Book Reviews
