Where the Falcon Flies

Looking out his porch window one spring morning, Adam Shoalts spotted a majestic peregrine falcon flying across the neighbouring fields near Lake Erie. Falcons migrate annually from southernmost Canada on the Great Lakes to remote arctic mountains. Grabbing his backpack and canoe, Shoalts resolved to follow the falcon's route north on an astonishing 3,400-kilometre journey from Lake Erie to the Arctic.

Along the way, he faces a huge variety of challenges and obstacles, including storms on the Great Lakes, finding campsites in the urban wilderness of Toronto and Montreal, avoiding busy commercial freighter traffic, gale force winds, massive hydro electric dams, bushwhacking without trails, dealing with hunger, multiple bear encounters, and navigating white-water rapids on icy northern rivers far from any help.

In his signature style, Shoalts roams as much across space as he does time, winding his way through a stunning diversity of landscapes ranging from lush Carolinian forests to lonely windswept mountains, salty seas to trackless swamps, pristine lakes to glittering mega-cities, as well as the sites of long ago battles, shipwrecks, forgotten forts and abandoned trading posts that shaped our country's history. But more importantly, he reveals how interconnected wild places are, from the loneliest depths of the northern wilderness to busy urban parks, and the vital importance of these connections.

Where the Falcon Flies invites readers on an extraordinary armchair adventure that spans five ecoregions and centuries of fascinating history, a masterwork by one of Canada's most successful and audacious authors.