A Wing in the Door: Life with a Red-Tailed Hawk

by Peri Phillips McQuay

Book Overview

Illegally plucked from her nest when only a month old to be trained for falconry, Merak is two when finally released. She isn't used to foraging for herself, however, and wanders into a nearby town.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1571312390
• ISBN13: 9781571312396
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Future Classic of Nature Literature

The fact that Milkweed Press has wisely chosen to reprint Peri Phillips McQuay's A Wing in the Door: Adventures with a Red-Tail Hawk (originally published in Canada in 1993), bespeaks its enduring value, and I think helps ensure its survival into the future as a classic of nature literature. Like another great Canadian nature writer, Farley Mowat (Never Cry Wolf), Peri Mcquay explores the relation between human and wild with wisdom, intelligence, and spirit. McQuay adds to these qualities a remarkably poetic prose which deeply involves the reader in the inner experience of her story-- which is also the story of Merak the hawk, who becomes movingly real to us through the pages of this wonderful book. 'A Wing in the Door' is even more convincing and enriching because it includes not only the human-imprinted hawk and her caretakers who are attempting to help her live as close to the wild as possible, but much of the other wildlife surrounding them as well. The world of 'A Wing in the Door' is broad, rich, and varied, as well as exciting and deeply poetic. To quote from a moment in the book when the author is enjoying watching Merak in flight: 'To fly through the wings of a hawk is like flying through a kite, only far better." As a scholar and teacher of nature literature and editor of two books on naturalist John Burroughs, I find this book a treasure, one that I hope to use in the classroom.

Praise for A Wing in the Door

Toronto Globe and Mail, June 23, 2001: "In the style of Jane Goodall and other...animal behaviourists, there's a magnificent tenderness in these narratives--emphatically not to be confused with sentimentality....[A] rare and enlightened witness to the truth of non-human nature."Washington Post Book World, April 22, 2001: "McQuay knows her land, knows its inhabitants, both plant and the animal, like a first language. Because of this she has written a compelling tale about wild places and wild and half-wild creatures and what it feels like to be around them that rings with authenticity."

Fine new Milkweed title.

This gentle, closely-observed, radiant work explores new territory in the genre of writing about animals. The red-tailed hawk, Merak, never gets more than a wing in the door, literally. She is neither reared nor rehabilitated in the McQuay house. She is brought to them Ñ on their 800 acre conservation area in Ontario Ñ by the local rehabilitator to be released back into the wild. It is only almost as the door to the cage is being opened that the McQuays find out that the hawk may be human imprinted, and thus Merak may be within the circle of their lives for the rest of her own. This book, like a crafted journal, tells the story of several years of Merak's life interwoven with the lives of the people who choose to feed her (mice and rats and muskrats) and look out after her. It is always the hawk who is the focus. Merak is neither wild nor domesticated, but lives in that space where more and more nonhuman creatures will be found, as human existence encroaches upon the natural states necessary for animals to be completely themselves. McQuay is all too aware of the losses that Merak must live with, and records them with the clarity and honesty available to someone who lives amidst such hard lessons.