THE LONGEST JOURNEY

Hevron traces an Arctic tern’s annual 60,000-mile round trip from Greenland to Antarctica and back.

Marking the route with dotted lines on simplified maps, the author depicts and describes her young bird’s wandering flight, which she bills as the longest of any animal, and imagined but likely experiences along the way—pausing for a rest in Tenerife, winging over flamingos in Liberia, following a “raft” of macaroni penguins to the Crozet Islands—to an Antarctic summer on pack ice in the Weddell Sea and then back, riding prevailing winds northward. Aside from one stylized glimpse of a ship in heavy seas, there is no visible sign of human activity, but Hevron does mention twice that the ocean waters from which the tern snatches krill and other food are “ever-warming,” then notes in the backmatter how rising temperatures drive those sources of nourishment to less accessible depths and also lead to seasonal storms severe enough to endanger nesting grounds. The backmatter also includes more information about this bird’s life cycle (Arctic terns can live for 30 years and so “fly the equivalent of three times to the Moon and back”) and generous lists of resources for further information.(This book was reviewed digitally.)

Well-deserved recognition for a migratory avian superstar.