In the Crosswinds: Birds, Humans, and the Paradox of Place

Homing is the story of one man's hilarious, sometimes quixotic quest to understand the meaning of place--and, for the rest of us, a manifesto for being truly present in the natural world.

Eli J. Knapp is a birder, ornithology professor, award-winning writer, and someone who can't quite shake the nearly-pervasive sense of rootlessness that comes with living on this mess of a planet. After years of studying and teaching about birds all over the world, Knapp set out to discover what birds may have to teach us about how to connect to the natural world. The end result isn't a book about looking at birds. It's a book through which birds offer an unexpected invitation to look further into ourselves and more deeply at the world around us.

From the woods of western New York to the jungles of Ecuador to the wetlands of Africa, Knapp takes us on a series of captivating and humorous journeys to see the world from a bird's eye view. In these avian worlds, we discover new ways of understanding how we fit into a more-than-human context and see how birds demonstrate the potential to unlock relationships--with one another and with place.

Homing reminds us that even though we may not always find the answers we were looking for, it's not because we didn't search hard enough. Finding our place in the world isn't a question of being in the right place at the right time; it is, instead, the deceptively simple revelation that we have been asking the wrong question all along.