From a Newsletter

Two weeks ago, I officially became freelance, and this week my final story for Hakai Magazine came out. I wrote a small ‘behind the scenes’ blurb for the magazine’s weekly newsletter, and I kind of like it, so I’m reprinting it here below.

To be honest, I’ve tried to write about this bird-catching experience before, and I’ll write about this night, again, from more than one angle, until I get it right. But for now….

During one field trip for this story, I accompanied a group of researchers on a nighttime bird-banding trip to a coastal mudflat, where I was given the task of carrying bewildered muffin-sized semipalmated sandpipers out into the dark and releasing them.

While tromping barefoot through the muck, away from the lights of the tent erected above the tideline for fieldwork, I had a few minutes to study the bird in my hand.

 Until I worked on this story I found birds kind of boring, to be honest. But up close, I found myself astonished. The bird’s body was warm, warmer than the summer night, warmer than my hand. It was profoundly soft. And it was so light! Like holding air. How could such a delicate creature fly a sixth of the way around the globe? What did it make of being snatched from the night by the invisible threads of a mist net and gently fumbled to and fro by big bare hands?

The bird’s eye was the size of a blackberry drupelet and gleamed with a pinprick reflection of the rising moon, and it was deeply, profoundly aware. A human in the same situation would be overcome with rage, or fear, or shame; the bird displayed no such obvious ego. Its eye was keen and steady, and it simply watched the world and waited to do something. It was a master class in something, and I didn’t completely understand what it was. I knew I’d never find a bird boring again.

 When the deepening water reached my ankles, I did as I’d been shown: I cupped my hand beneath the bird and reached my fingers up and around it like a cage. I held my arm out. I opened my fingers. The bird stayed a moment, maybe getting its bearings, maybe wondering if this freedom was a trap. Then I felt its tiny toothpick legs scrabble on my palm and press down slightly, and the sound of wingbeats like someone shaking out very small laundry, and it was gone.