Message in a Bottle: Ocean Dispatches from a Seabird Biologist

Message in a Bottle: Ocean Dispatches from a Seabird Biologist

Holly Hogan
$26.20
Publication Date: June 6th, 2023
Publisher:
Knopf Canada
ISBN:
9780385696265
Pages:
304

Description

WINNER OF THE 2023 BMO WINTERSET AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION

From the heart of the Labrador Current to the furthest reaches of our global oceans, Message in a Bottle conjures an exquisite diversity of marine life and warns of a central threat to its survival: ocean plastic.

The dovekie is a stocky seabird the size of a child's heart that spends its winters on the coast of Newfoundland, thriving in one of the toughest climates on Earth. The polar bear is an apex predator, designed to persevere in the Arctic's extreme conditions. The North Atlantic right whale outweighs the humpback by more than twenty tons and feeds on enormous quantities of tiny plankton in northeastern waters before migrating south for the winter.

In Message in a Bottle, wildlife biologist and writer Holly Hogan brings to life the wonder of these creatures and many other birds, fish and marine mammals she has encountered in her thirty years of ocean travel. On these voyages, Hogan has noticed a troubling pattern: the constant presence of plastic, in the form of adrift fishing gear ("ghost gear"), garbage and micro-plastics that create an invisible but pervasive smog in our oceans and threaten even the most seemingly resilient forms of sea life.

Bringing together nature, science and adventure writing, Hogan shines a light on our plastic-addicted lifestyle, offering an eyewitness account of its devastating effects on the marine environment--and highlighting international efforts to combat it. With lyrical prose and a reverential eye for the majesty and fragility of our natural world, Message in a Bottle is a clarion call to protect global oceans and the life they sustain, including our own.

About the Author

HOLLY HOGAN is a writer and wildlife biologist with a focus on seabirds. During her more than thirty years as a scientist, she has spent about a thousand days at sea conducting avian and marine mammal surverys and providing educational programming with expedition teams. Her work has taken her to the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans, and every latitude in between. She has been interviewed for CBC Radio, appears in a National Film Board series called Ocean School and provided expertise on seabirds and the impact of marine plastic for the award-winning documentary Hell or Clean Water (2021). Holly is a mother of three and lives in St. John's, Newfoundland, with her husband, Michael, and an assortment of cats and dogs, depending on the day.