Miyoko Chu's first book, "Songbird Journeys: Four Seasons in the Lives of Migratory Birds" (Walker and Co.), is a call to wonder and action.

Chu, a science writer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has authored a remarkable as well as alarming account of biannual songbird migrations. Chu's lucid work educates, entertains and inspires and will appeal to the backyard bird watcher, ornithologist or the lover of bird song for its own sake.

"Songbird Journeys" is far more than just a charming book about pretty birds -- it is a wide-eyed bit of research, and a sobering theme runs throughout it. Songbird populations are declining each season largely due to the activities of the very bipeds who marvel at their melodies: people.

Biologist Rachel Carson's controversial "Silent Spring" alerted the public to the impact of such pesticides as DDT on wildlife in 1962; since then, numerous other killers of migratory birds have been documented, from habitat destruction and domestic cats to collisions with windows and communications towers. Some experts estimate that the volume of migration over the Gulf of Mexico fell by 50 percent in just two decades between the 1960s and 1980s, and the numbers of many songbird species continue to dwindle.

"This realization has mobilized international efforts to save the places on which migratory birds and other wildlife depend," Chu writes in her introduction. "It may be that the remarkable amount of knowledge we have gained about songbirds has come just in time to save them."

The book explains without mea culpas why humans were in the dark for so long about songbird migrations. One simple reason is that many migratory songbirds mostly wing it at night, covering astonishing distances on their sojourns. For instance: Chu invites us to consider blackpoll warblers that travel from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean, "then embark on a nonstop ocean crossing of some 2,200 miles to South America." The warbler travels so efficiently during its 36-hour flight south, Chu writes, "that researchers calculate it would log some 720,000 miles to the gallon if it burned gasoline instead of its own fat."

Songbirds are hardwired with evolutionary adaptations that employ sidereal navigation, polarized light and the Earth's magnetic field. Given the head start they've had, it's not surprising that humans have only recently caught onto the nocturnal peregrinations of their fine-feathered friends.

All this Chu describes in orderly prose that takes flight with its subject without losing sight of her goal, and when readers reach the end of their journey, they are rewarded with appendices that direct them to songbird migration hotspots, citizen-science projects, resources and, of course, returned to Chu's home at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Released in March just in time for the upcoming dawn chorus, "Songbird Journeys" is an eye, ear and mind opener.