Author Katie Fallon will present a program on the Cerulean Warbler at the December Audubon Afternoon. The meeting will be held at Potomac Overlook Regional Park on December 11 from 3 - 5 PM. The address is:

2845 North Marcey Rd.
Arlington, VA

In her new book Cerulean Blues, Ms. Fallon describes the plight of the cerulean warbler, a tiny migratory songbird, and its struggle to survive in ever-shrinking bands of suitable habitat. This elusive creature, a favorite among bird watchers (recently seen on the cover of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom) and the fastest-declining warbler species in the United States, has lost 3% of its total population each year since 1966. This precipitous decline means that today there are 80% fewer ceruleans than forty years ago, and their numbers continue to drop because of threats including deforestation, global warming, and mountaintop removal coal mining.

With scientific rigor and a sense of wonder, Fallon leads readers on a journey of more than two thousand miles—from the top of the forest canopy in the ancient mountains of Appalachia to a coffee plantation near troubled Bogotá, Colombia—and shows how the fate of a creature weighing less than an ounce is vitally linked to our own.

Scott Weidensaul, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of more than twenty books, said, “From the gentle Appalachian ridges of West Virginia to the rebel-haunted cloud forests of Colombia, Katie Fallon immerses herself in the world of the cerulean warbler—a tiny, lovely songbird few Americans have heard of, but which is emblematic of the increasingly desperate plight of migratory birds in general. In Cerulean Blues, Fallon tracks not just the bird’s globe-hurtling journeys, but the passion and determination of the people in two hemispheres who are trying to save it.”

David Gessner, author of Return of the Osprey and Soaring with Fidel, said, “Katie Fallon inhabits the world of cerulean warblers with directness, humor, and real joy. In prose as clean and clear as water, she invites us into the world of both birds and birders. It’s a fascinating world, a world that bristles with life, and a world that expands far beyond the merely human. This book is a pleasure to read, and will open the eyes of many to the life of a small creature fighting an enormous fight.”

Katie Fallon’s nonfiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and journals, including Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Appalachian Heritage, and River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. Her essay, Lost, published in the journal The Fourth River, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2008. She teaches creative writing at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.V.