“My memory is etched with a clear image of how that bird swung into view and hung over me, suspended like an angel, so starkly black and white, with its wide-scissored split of a tail.”
It took just one sighting of a swallow-tailed kite to dispatch Susan Cerulean on a pilgrimage through its fragmented and ever-shrinking habitats. In Tracking Desire, Cerulean immerses us in the natural history and biology of Elanoides forficatus. At the same time, she sifts through her past―as a child, student, biologist, parent, and activist―to muse on a lifelong absorption with nature.
Once at home throughout much of the eastern United States, the swallow-tailed kite is now seldom seen. With ornithologist Ken Meyer, and then on her own, Cerulean roams the kite’s much-reduced homelands, gaining knowledge about the bird and the grave threats to its breeding grounds and migration patterns. Her quest takes her to the muddy banks of the Mississippi, to an enormous and vulnerable roost on corporate ranchlands in southwest Florida, and to the remnant pinelands of Everglades National Park.
In seeking the bird, Cerulean comes to question her own place in our consumerist society. “My journeys after kites have led me to understand that the power of our longings is placing the integrity of life on our tender emerald planet so greatly at risk,” she writes. “What are the fractured places in our hearts and minds and spirits that have allowed us to stand by and watch, and even to participate in, the destruction of so much of life?”

Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-Tailed Kites

Science & Math

Cerulean, Susan

Biological Sciences

University of Georgia Press

Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites

Coming to Pass tells the story of a little-developed necklace of northern Gulf Coast islands. Both a field guide to a beloved and impermanent Florida landscape and a call for its protection, Susan Cerulean’s memoir chronicles the uniquely beautiful coast as it once was, as it is now, and as it may be as the sea level rises.
For decades, Cerulean has kayaked, hiked, and counted birds on and around Dog, the St. Georges, and St. Vincent Islands with family and friends. She has collected scallops, snorkeled over a fallen lighthouse a mile offshore, and cast nets and fishing lines into cyclical runs of mullet and shrimp.
Like most people, she didn’t know how the islands had come to be or understand the large-scale change coming to the coast. With her husband, oceanographer Jeff Chanton, she studied the genesis of the coast and its inextricable link to the Apalachicola River. She interviewed scientists as they tracked and tallied magnificent and dwindling sea turtles, snowy white beach mice, and endangered plants. Illustrated with images from prizewinning nature photographer David Moynahan, Coming to Pass is the culmination of Cerulean’s explorations and a reflection of our spiritual relationship and responsibilities to the world that holds us.

Coming to Pass: Florida's Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change

History

Americas

I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter's Memoir (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

Susan Cerulean's memoir trains a naturalist's eye and a daughter's heart on the lingering death of a beloved parent from dementia. At the same time, the book explores an activist's lifelong search to be of service to the embattled natural world. During the years she cared for her father, Cerulean also volunteered as a steward of wild shorebirds along the Florida coast. Her territory was a tiny island just south of the Apalachicola bridge where she located and protected nesting shorebirds, including least terns and American oystercatchers. I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird weaves together intimate facets of adult caregiving and the consolation of nature, detailing Cerulean's experiences of tending to both. The natural world is the "sustaining body" into which we are born. In similar ways, we face not only a crisis in numbers of people diagnosed with dementia but also the crisis of the human-caused degradation of the planet itself, a type of cultural dementia. With I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, Cerulean reminds us of the loving, necessary toil of tending to one place, one bird, one being at a time.

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Review\nA beautiful and significant book.I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird offers a lament for the precious things that have passed, an elegy for the fragile beauty that remains,and a recognition of the inseparable Nature of all living things. With compassion, keen insights, and elegant prose, Susan Cerulean celebrates our inherent and intractable relationship with the natural world and explores the strange paradox of humanity's disconnections. -- Joe Hutto ― award-winning author of Illumination in the Flatwoods, The Light in High Places, and Touching the Wild\nWith astonishing grace, insight, and power, Susan Cerulean has written a memoir of such delicate balance and wisdom that it will forever have a hallowed place on your bookshelf. Daughter, wife, environmentalist, explorer, caretaker of humans and seashores, Cerulean offers vital truths just when we need them most. -- Connie May Fowler ― author of A Million Fragile Bones\n'Our task is to watch over the world with such care,?' writes Susan Cerulean, and she does exactly this with each beautiful sentence of this wise and prescient book. She also lovingly acts and responds to her father living with dementia and as a steward to shorebirds she knows intimately by name on the coast of Florida. I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird is an elegant memoir of devotion and imagination inviting us with graceful determination to extend our compassion and sense of family to all species on this beautiful, broken planet we call home. This book is an awakening. -- Terry Tempest Williams ― author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing\nI thoroughly enjoyed this beautifully written tribute to a beloved father and unique window into the life and career of a conservationist I have long admired. Sue brings her characteristic grace and humanity to the entire story, whether she is writing about her father’s long decline or the challenges of conservation in the face of Florida’s relentless growth. -- Julie Wraithmell, executive director, Audubon Florida\nPoignant. . . . In these pages, you’ll find courage and strength comes from living with this planet, not on it. -- Saundra Kelley ― Tallahassee Democrat\nAnyone who has walked a loved one along the meandering descent dictated by dementia or who is attuned enough to the outdoors to be able to distinguish among a plover, a sandpiper and a killdeer will find . . . Susan Cerulean’s latest book, I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, to be an affecting and, in some ways, disturbing work. -- Steve Bornhoft ― Tallahassee Magazine\nIn her tender and wise memoir chronicling both her end-of-life care for her octogenarian father and her stewardship of seabirds on an isolated Florida island, Susan Cerulean brings to the fore the responsibilities and rewards of bearing witness to and advocating for delicate lives in transition. . . . I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird is both elegy and call to action, a beautiful remembrance of a life now gone from this earth and an impassioned plea to serve as caregivers to that same earth and its myriad creatures. -- Jonathan Haupt ― Southern Review of Books\nSusan Cerulean is known for deftly weaving connections between the scientific and personal. In her latest work, I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter’s Memoir, she does it with an almost magical mastery. -- Kathleen Laufenberg ― Tallahassee Democrat\nCerulean's voice is a clarion call for us to pay excruciating attention to the world around us. -- Trish MacEnulty ― Tallahassee Democrat\nSusan Cerulean’s memoir trains a naturalist’s eye and a daughter’s heart on the lingering death of a beloved parent from dementia. At the same time, the book explores an activist’s lifelong search to be of service to the embattled natural world. During the years she cared for her father, Cerulean also volunteered as a steward of wild shorebirds along the Florida coast. Her territory was a tiny island just south of the Apalachicola bridge where she located and pr

Self-Help

Thirty leading naturalists and writers survey the fabulous geographies of north Florida's Gulf Coast and the Red Hills of southwest Georgia.

Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf

Ray, Janisse

Newton, Laura

Heart of the Earth

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cerulean, Susan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cerulean, Susan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cerulean, Susan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-Tailed Kites

Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites

Coming to Pass: Florida's Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change

Coming to Pass: Florida's Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change

I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter's Memoir (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter's Memoir (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf