Parts Unknown: A Naturalist's Journey in Search of Birds and WildPlaces - Review

Animals, Fall, 2001 by Paula Abend

Parts Unknown: A Naturalist's Journey in Search of Birds and Wild Places. By Tim Gallagher. 224 pages. Lyons Press. $24.95 hardcover.

Take a passion for birds, a love of the wild, and an incurable dash of wanderlust, and you've got the makings of unforgettable experiences. Add a generous helping of fluent writing, honesty, and environmental awareness, and you've got Parts Unknown, a recounting of Tim Gallagher's adventures in some of the earth's most remote places.

This collection of essays chronicles visits to the icy wilds of northern Greenland and Iceland, where the author dangles from a rope off gyrfalcon nest cliffs, and to the barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico to trap peregrine falcons. He returns to Greenland to journey hundreds of miles in an open boat along the island's coast to check 210 nesting sites documented by a Danish physician at the beginning of the last century. A flight over the Everglades inspires an examination of the ecosystem's threats. Gallagher even braves a visit to a polluted marsh in New Jersey to compete in the World Series of Birding.

The prizes in all these travels are the glimpses of avian life Gallagher comes away with, glimpses he captures in stunning detail in photographs displayed in the book's full-color insert.

Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of birds, their habitat, and the people who study them.