Life on the Wing
Adventures with Birds of Prey
(Round Table Press, 1996)

Life on the Wing is a delightful story-book and an elegant picture-book about adventures with hawks, falcons, and owls. Like a journey on a magic carpet into the world of nature, these engaging, often funny, and sometimes tragic stories bring you along on exciting trips with the author and his friends as they go a field with their avian and canine hunting partners. As you read these episodes, you will laugh out loud at the misadventures that befall the author and his companions when their outings are enlivened by complete acts of disorder (such as an exploding recreational vehicle, the incontinent hunting dog that wrecks a motel room, or the falcon that inadvertently stoops straight into a snow bank). In addition to laughter, you will experience the full spectrum of human emotions ranging from sheer joy (when Lancelot, the author's gyrfalcon, catches his first sage grouse) to sorrow and outrage (when Ragnar, Greg Hayes' peregrine falcon, is shot and killed by a coarse, ignorant fellow).

The stories are accompanied by 25 stunning full-color plates (and over 75 black-and-white photographs) that illustrate not only the sheer beauty and power of birds of prey, but also provide images of some of characters, settings, dogs, and game species described in the text. The beautiful painting on the dust jacket was created by Dr. Greg Hayes especially for this volume, to which he also contributed other paintings, photographs, and a chapter on prairie grouse. Original works by the well-known English masters G. E. Lodge and D. M. Reid-Henry, some published here for the first time, will please the eye of the naturalist who loves fine art -- as will the numerous paintings and photographs contributed by outstanding American wildlife artists.

A strong, metaphysical theme underlies Life on the Wing: Hawks and falcons are animal envoys of the Unseen Power that can serve as our guides into a wonderful world known to relatively few twentieth-century humans.