WILDLIFE WATCHING -- The 2001 documentary Winged Migration, drew public attention to birds in a new way by attaching cameras to big birds in flight and filming them as if we were soaring right alongside the flock. 

The Messenger does for songbirds what Winged Migration did for big birds in many ways, says Peter Rainer, film critic for the Christian Science Monitor. It talks about the threat to birds posed by human development, not to mention loose-roaming cats.

The documentary is "a much more pointedly ecocentric movie, but then again, climate science has come a long way in the past decade," Rainer says. "One of the main rallying points of The Messenger is that birds have “something to tell us” about the environment’s mounting ecological hazards. The canary in a coal mine phenomenon, according to this film, has assumed global proportions."

See the trailer below and a video from "behind the scenes of filming" the documentary.  Keep an eye out for it.