Deborah Cramer, Naturalist and Author of
“The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, an Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey”
To Discuss
Incredible 19,000-Mile Migration of the Red Knot
As
Final Program of 2016 “Underwater in Salem Sound” Lecture Series
Wednesday, April 27th, 7:00 pm
Co-sponsored by Salem Sound Coastwatch and the Abbot Public Library
In The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, an Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey, author Deborah Cramer accompanies tiny sandpipers – red knots – along their extraordinary 19,000-mile odyssey from one end of the earth to the other. She tracks birds from remote beaches in Tierra del Fuego up into the icy tundra where they nest, stopping along the way on moonlit beaches at spring’s highest tides, to seek the world’s greatest concentration of horseshoe crabs, whose eggs fuel the birds’ migration and whose blue blood safeguards human health. The Narrow Edge is a firsthand account of the tenacity of life along the sea edge, and an inspiring portrait of loss and renewal.
Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, wrote that The Narrow Edge is “at once an intimate portrait of the small red knot and a much larger exploration of our wondrous, imperiled world.” National Geographic Conservation Fellow Tom Lovejoy wrote that Cramer’s account is “more thrilling than the Kentucky Derby.”
Join her on the journey, to explore what’s at stake, for shorebirds, horseshoe crabs, and for us.
Deborah Cramer lives with her family at the edge of a salt marsh in Gloucester, where each spring she awaits the arrival of alewives in the creeks, and horseshoe crabs and shorebirds in the bay. She is the author of two natural histories of the sea, Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage, and Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water Our World, the companion to the Ocean Hall at the U.S. National Museum of Natural History. Her writing has most recently appeared on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, in feature stories for the Boston Globe and Audubon Magazine.
“The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, An Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey” is the final program in the 2016 “Underwater in Salem Sound,” Lecture Series, a continuation of the lecture series, begun in 2013, jointly sponsored by Salem Sound Coastwatch and the Abbot Public Library, in Marblehead, MA. All the lectures are free and open to the public.
The Abbot Public Library is located at 235 Pleasant Street, Marblehead, MA 01945. For additional information, please call 781-631-1481 or visit www.abbotlibrary.org.
