For humans, one of the most dependable sights of early spring is a flock of birds migrating north for the summer. But what do the birds see? In the BBC series EarthFlight and an accompanying book of photographs, filmmaker John Downer brings us amazing views of earth and of birds in flight as they travel across land and sea. Downer and his team filmed from gliders and planes; they even mounted tiny high-definition cameras on the birds. The result is a literal bird’s-eye view of our world–from the Great Wall to the Grand Canyon, and the tropics to the Arctic.

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Images used with permission from EarthFlight by John Downer. Published by Firefly Books. Photo credits, from top left to bottom right: Andy Kemp, Christian Moullec, Rob Pilley, Christian Moullec, Richard Cook, Philip Dalton.