For the past quarter-century, researcher and author Scott Weidensaul has overseen a major project to understand the migration of Northern Saw-whet Owls in the central Appalachians, using a variety of techniques — banding, geolocators, radio telemetry, even radar and infrared cameras — to study their movements. After banding more than 12,000 owls, he and his colleagues have peeled back much of the mystery around this smallest of Eastern owls, but many questions still remain — and they’re not going to get a good night’s sleep in the fall any time soon.

Scott Weidensaul is the author of more than two dozen books on natural history, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist “Living on the Wind” and his latest, the New York Times bestseller “A World on the Wing.” Weidensaul is a contributing editor for Audubon, a columnist for Bird Watcher’s Digest and writes for a variety of other publications, including Living Bird. He is a Fellow of the American Ornithological Society and an active field researcher, studying saw-whet owl migration for more than two decades, as well as winter hummingbirds, bird migration in Alaska, and the winter movements of snowy owls through Project SNOWstorm, which he co-founded.