" The Grassland Queen is a gorgeous love poem, a profound meditation, an odyssey as sweeping as the American Plains. I now love curlews with a passion that takes me aback and feel a new urgency to save their shimmering grassland homes. You will, too." --Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus "What a joy it is to explore America's prairies with Priyanka Kumar. The Grassland Queen is a beautiful hybrid: part field guide, part love song, and part call to action. Kumar's devotion to the long-billed curlew and its habitats sings from every page of this fascinating journey." --Emily Nemens, author of The Cactus League and Clutch "New Mexico has a habit of bringing out stellar writing on the natural world--Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Sharman Apt Russell, and now Priyanka Kumar with this delicious book on an elusive bird. Traveling across her home state and far beyond, Kumar parts the veil between humans and nature, stepping through graciously and smartly.
What an intimate pleasure to be by her side." --Craig Childs, author of The Wild Dark "Closely observed and vividly evoked on the page, Kumar's studies of her 'Zen' birds illuminate the wonders of American grasslands, alongside the many threats they face. Mind and heart synergize in these reflections, offering depth and nuance." --David George Haskell, biologist and two-time Pulitzer-finalist author of How Flowers Made Our World "Priyanka Kumar is the female John McPhee." --James McGrath Morris, author of The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War and Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power "In this moving elegy to our vanishing prairies, Priyanka Kumar tells the story of the long-billed curlew. The book is a meditation on the western grasslands told with the patience of someone familiar with Zen writing and the perspective of her Himalayan childhood. This is nature writing at its best, robust biology enriched with history and personal experience. It is a must-read for anyone who cares about wildness, birds, environmental history, or our magnificent grasslands.
" --Joan Strassmann, Washington University in St. Louis and author of Slow Birding "I just love this book! It's a great story, well told. I grew up with curlews--their voices haunt beautiful, lonely landscapes. And, as this book recounts, grasslands are landscapes on which human actions increasingly impinge." --Stuart L. Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, International Cosmos Prize winner, and president of Saving Nature "Priyanka Kumar offers a paean to the magnificent long-billed curlew, North America's largest and most handsome shorebird. Her tale is also a lament on the steady disappearance of the great expanses of native grasslands of the West that provide critical breeding habitat for this great shorebird. She richly describes her encounters with the curlews that she studies, along with the many plants and animals that populate her favorite haunts, to bring attention to a unique habitat that merits more appreciation.
" --Bruce M. Beehler, author of Flight of the Godwit: Tracking Epic Shorebird Migrations.