Eleven year-old Ursula Neilsen never believed NASA's verdict that carelessness caused the death of her older sister, an astronaut on a routine mission to a crippled satellite, but there wasn't much a kid could do about it. Years later, she finds herself the target of someone who's trying to kill her because she knows too much. Seeking help from a disgruntled former NASA engineer, she learns the space agency is covering up the presence of an alien her sister made contact with. It's a secret that seems about to cost her her life.

The human history of depicting birds dates to as many as 40,000 years ago, when Paleolithic artists took to cave walls to capture winged and other beasts. But the art form has reached its peak in the last four hundred years. In The Art of the Bird, devout birder and ornithologist Roger J. Lederer celebrates this heyday of avian illustration in forty artists’ profiles, beginning with the work of Flemish painter Frans Snyders in the early 1600s and continuing through to contemporary artists like Elizabeth Butterworth, famed for her portraits of macaws. Stretching its wings across time, taxa, geography, and artistic style—from the celebrated realism of American conservation icon John James Audubon, to Elizabeth Gould’s nineteenth-century renderings of museum specimens from the Himalayas, to Swedish artist and ornithologist Lars Jonsson’s ethereal watercolors—this book is feathered with art and artists as diverse and beautiful as their subjects. A soaring exploration of our fascination with the avian form, The Art of the Bird is a testament to the ways in which the intense observation inherent in both art and science reveals the mysteries of the natural world.

An indispensable resource for anyone in need of avian art, this magnificent compendium comprises more than 600 royalty-free images. Featuring the work of many different artists, it abounds in accurate renderings of ducks and geese, herons, owls, eagles, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, and many other birds, both familiar and less well known, from the world over.

The Bird explores the fascinating world of 18th- and 19th-century ornithological illustration. This was a period of scientific, artistic, and geographic discovery, when people began to fully appreciate the immense variety of form and color within the natural world. This book celebrates this beauty through the lavish illustrations produced at that time. Within each chapter, there will be an opportunity to learn a little more about the artists that helped to elevate the art form. From Audubon to Gould and from MacGillivray to Lear we learn how technology, travel, and ambition shaped their work, and how their work transformed our understanding of the wonderful world of birds.