Raptors: Portraits of Birds of Prey

By Marjorie Luckey

This delightful and dramatic portrait collection reveals birds of prey as we never experience them: intimate and up close.
Photographed in Traer Scott's signature style, these fascinating hunters reveals their enigmatic beauty and grace. Seventy spectacular color images present twenty-five different species, from the familiar to the exotic and endangered: hawks, owls, falcons, a bald eagle, kestrels, a Mississippi Kite, a turkey vulture, and more. Joining their elders are a fluffy baby vulture and adorable baby and juvenile great horned owls.
The birds in this remarkable collection emerge as personalities, not just types: wise and quizzical, serene, and fiercely self-possessed. A personal introduction describes Scott's process and connection to the birds, and captions detail the characteristics and habits of these incredible winged creatures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781616896836

Book preview

Introduction

When I was young, one of the four bedrooms in our house was simply known as the spare room. In this superfluous room, there was an ironing board; a flimsy work desk where my father kept scraps of ivory and etching tools for scrimshaw; random boxes filled with the detritus of family life: books, papers, costumes, and photographs that had no other home; and numerous animal cages. The animals had usually come home with my mother from the museum where she was a volunteer. That small natural-science museum had a lot of dioramas displaying a menagerie of dead things and a live-animal education center where schoolchildren came to see and sometimes touch indigenous reptiles and insects, along with some exotic specimens like hissing cockroaches and pythons. From time to time, people brought the museum injured or orphaned wildlife, and my family functioned as amateur rehabilitators, nursing these animals back to health. This was often done with limited knowledge, usually consisting of facts and suggestions that the local library and a few native wildlife experts offered up.

Of all of the animals that shared the rather dull, suburban experience of life in the spare room, the one that I remember the most was a tiny screech-owl who lived with us for several months. I believe that this tiny owl had flown into someone’s sliding glass door, of which there were a great many in North Carolina. The panoramic reflections in these giant sheets of glass (like those in any window) confuse birds and cause many millions of avian deaths every year.

This owl had been stunned and suffered an injured wing. Only about seven inches tall, the little owl that we categorically named Screech lived in a small wire cage in the spare room, where she perched and slept and clicked her beak when she wanted something. We fed her live, unconscious mice, which she swallowed whole, usually pausing with the poor creature’s tail hanging out of