Return to the Sky: The Surprising Story of How One Woman and Seven Eaglets Helped Restore the Bald Eagle

Alone in a vast wildlife refuge with little direction and no experience, a Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology student found herself responsible for a project of historical importance--to bring the Bald Eagle back from near extinction.

In Return to the Sky, Tina Morris, one of the first women to engage in a raptor reintroduction program, shares her remarkable story that is as much about the human spirit as it is about birds of prey.

In the spring of 1975, on the eve of the US Bicentennial, Tina was selected to reintroduce Bald Eagles into New York State in the hope that the species could eventually repopulate eastern North America. Young and female in a male-dominated field, Tina was handed an assignment to rehabilitate a population that had been devastated by the effects of DDT. The challenges were prodigious--there was no model to emulate for a bird of the eagle's size, for one--but Tina soon found that her own path to self-discovery and confidence-building was deeply connected with the survival of the species she was chosen to protect.

Ultimately, Tina spent two years playing "mother" to seven eaglets at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, east of Seneca Falls in New York. Driven by her passion, she discovered unknown reserves of patience, determination, and grit.

At a time when the mass extinction of bird species is a critical global topic, Return to the Sky reminds us how, with a mix of common sense, resilience, and resolve, humans can be effective stewards of the natural world.

Raised in a large family and surrounded by myriad orphaned creatures both domestic and wild, Tina Morris was imbued with a lifelong love of animals. After a few wrong turns and a stormy relationship with science in college, she found a way to make her life's ambition--rescuing endangered birds of prey--into a reality. Tina earned her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College and her graduate degree in ornithology and wildlife biology from Cornell University, where she helped develop the first techniques for releasing introduced Bald Eagles. Her field research ultimately became the instruction manual for eagle restoration programs in other eastern states. Tina was formally inducted as an honorary Iroquois into the Confederacy of Six Nations for her work returning the Bald Eagle to the nation's skies.