Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites [Paperback]

SUSAN CERULEAN is a writer, naturalist, and advocate based in Tallahassee, Florida. She has written and edited many books, including gold medal Florida Book Award winner Coming to Pass: Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change, and her nature memoir, Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites (both Georgia), that was named and Editor’s Choice title by Audubon magazine. I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter’s Memoir (also Georgia) is her most recent work.

My memory is etched with a clear image of how that bird swung into view and hung over me, suspended like an angel, so starkly black and white, with its wide-scissored split of a tail.

It took just one sighting of a swallow-tailed kite to dispatch Susan Cerulean on a pilgrimage through its fragmented and ever-shrinking habitats. In Tracking Desire, Cerulean immerses us in the natural history and biology of Elanoides forficatus. At the same time, she sifts through her past—as a child, student, biologist, parent, and activist—to muse on a lifelong absorption with nature.

Once at home throughout much of the eastern United States, the swallow-tailed kite is now seldom seen. With ornithologist Ken Meyer, and then on her own, Cerulean roams the kite’s much-reduced homelands, gaining knowledge about the bird and the grave threats to its breeding grounds and migration patterns. Her quest takes her to the muddy banks of the Mississippi, to an enormous and vulnerable roost on corporate ranchlands in southwest Florida, and to the remnant pinelands of Everglades National Park.

In seeking the bird, Cerulean comes to question her own place in our consumerist society. My journeys after kites have led me to understand that the power of our longings is placing the integrity of life on our tender emerald lB