Showing results for "The Voyager" in Outdoors & Nature

We have lived with seabirds for at least 300,000 years. From the beginning our view of them has been double, as creatures that are both deeply distant and yet strangely connected to us, both oceanic in what they represent and a mirror of what we are. They stand in for our relationship with nature as a whole. We use them and love them, nurture them and destroy them, revere them and make toys and hats and dinner out of them. It is a pattern that has evolved over history, and our relationship with seabirds has moved through these phases like steps in a game of hopscotch.

A global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds on our planet is in free fall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last 60 years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the 10 birds in this audiobook, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of the seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory.