Peregrine Spring: A Master Falconer's Extraordinary Life with Birds of Prey Audiobook

Peregrine Spring, Nancy Cowan’s memoir of her thirty years living intimately with raptors, gives us a new perspective on the relationship between humans and the natural world. Cowan shares her experiences running a world-famous falconry school, and the lessons she’s learned from her birds. From retrieving her falcon from the local police “lock up,” to a heartbreaking race to save her young peregrine from attack by a wild hawk, Cowan’s life is a constant, ever-changing adventure. Cowan’s birds have immersed her so much into their world that she has found herself courted by a Goshawk and bossed about by a Harris’s Hawk. The book carries her readers along, so they, too, meet hawks and falcons in ways they never imagined possible.

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“Nancy Cowan’s Peregrine Spring is the best narrative of a modern falconer’s life I know. It’s not a how-to, though you can learn plenty from it. Nor does Nancy pose as an all-knowing ‘Master,’ though she is a master—or mistress—of our ancient practice. What she does give us is a falconry pilgrim’s progress, from beginner to teacher, with all the thrills and delights and sometimes horrors that accompany the journey. I plan to give this book to every person who approaches me and wishes to become a falconer. It’s essential.”

— Steve Bodio, author of A Rage for Falcons