A splendid and luminous celebration of one of nature’s most perfect and mysterious creatures—the hawk—from the New York Times best-selling author of the “astoundingly beautiful” (NPR) The Soul of an Octopus.

When Sy Montgomery went to spend a day at falconer Nancy Cowan’s farm, home to a dozen magnificent birds of prey, it was the start of a deep love affair. Nancy allowed her to work with Jazz, a feisty, four-year-old, female Harris’s hawk with a wingspan of more than four feet. Not a pet, Jazz was a fierce predator with talons that could pierce skin and bone, and yet, she was willing to work with a human to hunt. From the first moment Jazz swept down from a tree and landed on Sy’s leather-gloved fist, Sy fell under the hawk’s magnetic spell.