Each year a sandpiper, the red knot, flies 19,000 miles from one end of the earth to the other and back. The migration is fueled in part by the eggs of horseshoe crabs, one of earth’s oldest animals, whose blue blood safeguards human health. Author **Deborah Cramer** followed the birds and horseshoe crabs to remote, windswept beaches along the Strait of Magellan; in bug-infested hunting preserves and gleaming oyster banks in South Carolina; in Delaware Bay—an avian Serengeti and the world’s greatest concentration of horseshoe crabs; inside the research warrens of Massachusetts General Hospital; and up into the icy, inhospitable tundra where the birds nest. She reads briefly from her book.
Deborah Cramer lives with her family at the edge of a salt marsh in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she awaits the return of the alewives into tidal creeks each spring, and writes about science, nature, and the environment. She was awarded the science writing fellowship at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT in 2005-2006, and is currently a visiting scholar at MIT’s Earth System Initiative. She has written two books, Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage (W.W. Norton 2001) and Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water Our World (2008), and has lectured about her writing and the sea on both sides of the Atlantic, at science and maritime museums, at major environmental and teachers' organizations, and at undergraduate and graduate schools in oceanography and journalism.