For over a decade, photographer Rosalie Winard has traveled the country by foot, canoe, airboat, and ATV, taking pictures of large birds of the wetlands from Florida to California, Louisiana to North Dakota. Her intimate portraits—tethered to an ethereal palette of white, gray, and black—are alight with Winard's passion for the avian world and its endangered terrain. Alternately meditative and exhilarating, abstract and literal, they capture the birds' remarkable habits and prehistoric forms, as well as their ineffable elegance and humor.

Wild Birds of the American Wetlands is a monumental and breathtaking study of some of the country's most beautiful birds—Great Blue Heron, White Ibis, Snowy Egret, Whooping Crane, Roseate Spoonbill, American White Pelican, Wood Stork, and many more—and of their vanishing habitats. From the Ballona Wetlands in California to the prairies of Nebraska, Winard uses her thirty years of experience observing these winged creatures along with her mastery of photography to illuminate the importance of avian and wetland conservation. Winard's camera lens has replaced her binoculars as she searches for images that depict the birds' elusive aspects and paradoxes: their simultaneous fragility and power, tranquility and action, stillness and momentum. At once a documentary photographer, artist, and student of natural history, each of Winard's photographs slips soundlessly into a vivid and detailed realism.