On the Wing - Alan Tennant

Tennant was working on a project banding arctic peregrines along the Texas Gulf Coast in the late '80s. At that time, it was known where the peregrines ended up during the summer (Alaska/the Yukon), and roughly where they migrated in the winter (Latin America). The specific routes they took were only guessed at, since even with radio transmitters being attached, no one was bothering to actually follow them.

So Tennant gets the notion to try, and gets the 70-year-old pilot that was assisting on the project to buy in as well, and off they go. The actual tracking of the falcon he catches and tags - who he names Amelia, after Amelia Earhart - is only maybe a third of the book. Tennant spends the first 50 or so pages on the work he was involved with in Texas, his attempts to actually catch a bird for this, the trouble he gets himself into with the Army by running his yap. 

Tennant's not clear on why the Army is interested in project that's tracking falcons partially to take blood samples to check for incidences of health issues related to pesticide concentration in their bodies, but it's probably something nefarious. Some idiot that wanted to revive that World War 2 idea about releasing bats with tiny incendiary devices attached over Japan to start fires or something.

The book spends time on the issues of actually finding Amelia again several times, but how excited Alan and George get when they actually do pick up her trail. George seems to only agree at first because he loves flying, but he seems to get almost as attached as Alan. The hazards of flying a barely stitched together Cessna and using whatever tiny airstrip they can happen to find to land. The last third of the book, Alan tags a couple of other falcons the following fall and convinces George they should fly south and try to track them that way. Which leads to a lot of adventures in Central America with Guatemalan rebels and accidentally landing on a drug plane airstrip in the middle of a cane field.

The end is a little odd, because Tennant's been steadily pissing away his relationship with his girlfriend on this mad chase. Even when she seemed on board to go south with him, he wouldn't wait the day or two she needed to be ready. So right at the end, he has some kind of epiphany about how this hasn't really been about the falcons and tries to patch things up, but it's not a romantic comedy. It's a little strange, because he's spent almost 300 pages talking about what it is about falcons that attracts humans to them, causes them to be regarded so highly by us, and then it's almost like he regrets getting sucked in?

For the most part though, it's a fast read and Tennant offers enough description of the places and people they encounter to really give a sense of the scale of their trip, even if he and George can't follow their falcons all the way to the end.

'Winging along below, neither falcon felt herself embarked on some desperate southward journey; each was simply exercising her newfound freedom of movement through the air, hungrily chasing smaller birds when the chance arose. The only vision of a distant Caribbean shore was mine.'