In Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95, Phillip Hoose, M.F.S. ‘77, takes children around the hemisphere with the world’s most celebrated shorebird. He explores the tragedy of extinction through the triumph of a single bird, B95, a robin-sized shorebird and a red knot of the subspecies rufa. Each February he joins a flock that lifts off from Tierra del Fuego, headed for breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic, 9,000 miles away. Late in the summer, he begins the return journey. Scientists call him the Moonbird because, in the course of his astoundingly long lifetime, this gritty, four-ounce bird has flown the distance to the moon and halfway back. Since 1995, however, when B95 was first captured and banded, the worldwide rufa population has collapsed by nearly 80 percent. Hoose introduces readers, though, to a worldwide team of scientists and conservationists trying to save them, and explains what we can do to help before it’s too late. The book is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
