HOOK

2024 | HOOK MAGAZINE 61 Return To The Sky By Tina Morris The Bald Eagle is a majes9c bird, as anyone who has had the honor of seeing one in the wild can a:est. A much-recognised symbol of The United States of America, today these incredible raptors roam the en- 9rety of North America, but such was not always the case. According to a survey done in 2018, there were over 315,000 Bald Eagles in the con9nen- tal United States at the 9me. This is in stark contrast to the situa9on fac- ing the species approximately 50 years earlier, when at one point it was es9mated in the early 1970s that there were only 417 breeding pairs remaining. The reemergence of the Bald Eagle is one of this country's greatest environmental success sto- ries, and one of the architects of that success was a young graduate stu- dent at Cornell University with li:le actual raptor experience who was chosen in 1975 to reintroduce our na9on's avian mascot into New York State. Author Tina Morris spent two years playing mother to seven young ea- gles at Montezuma Na9onal Wildlife Refuge near Seneca Falls, New York. Now, almost 50 years later, she shares her story with Return to the Sky. It is a beau9fully-wri:en, grip- ping narra9ve detailing her journey from pre-med dropout to zookeeper to inexperienced raptor savior. Read- ing her tale, one is struck by the diffi- cul9es Morris overcame in order to care for her charges: their nest, their feeding, their first flight. Not being a Bald Eagle herself, Morris had to im- provise in truly ingenious ways to give the young birds the best chance of success and to ensure that they re- mained wild and did not im- print upon a human being. Caring for the young Bald Eagles meant living with them in the Wildlife Refuge, which meant spending days at a 9me u:erly without human companionship. She buried herself into her work to dis9ll the loneliness, watching the raptors con- stantly and taking painstak- ingly detailed notes about every aspect of the birds' day. The pressure she was under, not just from an envi- ronmental aspect but from a poli9cal one as well, was immense. The year was 1976. It was the Na9on's Bi- centennial, and everyone wanted the Bald Eagle to survive as a symbol of America's greatness. The book is broken up into five sec9ons. Sec9on one gives us Morris' back- ground, sec9on two re- volves around the 1976 program which featured her first two eagles. Following that is a sec9on on 1977 and her second program, which featured five young eagles. These are the main two sec9ons of the book, but she does add two more smaller sec9ons where she talks about her own life a(er this grand experiment as well as the lives of some of the eagles she mothered during those incredible two years. Conserva9on stories are always gripping and per- sonal, but something about Morris' experience tran- scends the genre. She puts the reader deep in that Wildlife Refuge, alone and unprepared but also filled with the excitement and thrill of watching these frag- ile birds grow and mature in the wild. Their success li(s the reader to new heights, and her tale is most defi- nitely worth sharing, The Earth in Our Hands By Thomas Pesquet Few of us will ever be lucky enough to visit the Interna- 9onal Space Sta9on. Astronaut Thomas Pesquet, however, has had the good fortune to do so twice thus far in his life. In his new book, The Earth in Our Hands, he shares his one-of-a- kind experience with us in the best way possible--with lots and lots of pictures! The images are awe-inspiring--the Earth in all her glory captured from 250 miles above the surface. The book contains images of oceans, mountains, rivers, and deserts from every con9nent on Earth. There are also incredi- ble images of storms whirling through the oceans, wildfires with smoke covering hundreds of miles, and ci9es at night lit up like a Broadway marquee. The book is divided into 13 sec- 9ons addressing various features of Earth, such as Storms, Moun- tains, or Rivers, and includes sev- eral beau9ful fold-out, panorama-style images. Each sec9on is prefaced with Pes- quet's thoughts on the topic, and all of the book's over 200 images are accompanied by at least a paragraph of explana9on. To flip through these pages is to look at our world in new and interes9ng ways. There is a handy table of contents at the back of the book, but the true joy is in just opening the book to any page and discov- ering the wonder captured there, be it an image of Mt. Vesuvius and Naples, Italy, or a colorful au- rora dazzling over the Earth. Besides being beau9ful, the photos also serve another pur- pose: they show that smoke from immense wildfires doesn't stay within na9onal boundaries, and that massive hurricanes will sweep up the coast without discrimina9on. Over the course of the book, Pesquet makes an impassioned plea through his words and images for a univer- sal acknowledgment of the ef- fects of global climate change. He has seen first hand the dam- age it is doing to our world, and he wants to share that aware- ness with his readers. As a whole, Pesquet's incredible im- ages show vividly our wildly di- verse but interconnected world.

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