About Suzie Gilbert

First and fourth photos by John Huba. 
Last photo by Janet Taub.

Suzie Gilbert grew up in Oyster Bay, New York rescuing animals from hamsters to horses. She took in stray dogs in Manhattan and castoff parrots when she moved upstate, where a trip to the Hudson Valley Raptor Center sparked her love of wild birds. During her 11 years of working at the sanctuary, she created their newsletter, authored the children's book Hawk Hill (Chronicle Books), and wrote the Taconic News Media environmental column, Bird’s Eye View.

After leaving the raptor center, she opened Flyaway, Inc., a home-based all-species wild bird rehab nonprofit. She chronicled those tumultuous years of rehabbing and raising her children in the best-selling memoir Flyaway: How a Wild Bird Rehabber Sought Adventure and Found Her Wings (HarperCollins). She wrote the wild bird rehabilitation blog The Crooked Wing, then joined the global birding site 10,000 Birds.

Wanting to bring the world of wildlife rehabilitation to a general audience, she wrote the comic, suspenseful road trip novel Unflappable - an award-winning story of two millennials who attempt to smuggle a stolen Bald Eagle from Key West to Ontario via an underground railroad of wildlife rescuers. 

She is a regular speaker at wildlife conferences and symposiums, and enjoys keeping tabs on her kids: Mac, who climbed El Capitan and is now a licensed arborist with his own tree company, and Skye, who solo adventured from Berlin to Croatia and is now a short story writer and bartender in Greenwich Village.