By LAURA MARRIS
Somewhere in those years of 6 a.m. flights, I developed a recurring dream of a place I knew in the northwesternmost corner of Connecticut, where stone walls snaked among the trees of a forest that had once been farmland. The kind of town where the post office is also home to two chipmunks, one messy and one clean. A place full of wild birds, the flocks of my earliest childhood, vortexes of robins where rural woods broke open into fields. Where I had dug in the streambed and drunk the shimmer of mica with the silt. Where old traces of human mining and clear-cutting had been softened by an enveloping abundance. I felt myself wanting to check on it, wondering how it was doing.
When I was a small child just learning to read, we lived for a time in the schoolhouse there, which overlooks a meadow. In the evening as the light fell, I would watch what I thought were swallows swooping over the tall grass, their movements jagged but graceful, mirroring the insects they chased. My father was the one who told me they were bats. We’d stand in the doorway as the wings disappeared into the darkness and the fireflies began their night signals, hovering over the field. I was learning to read the landscape, too—and with each word I became more connected, as the names of creatures unlocked the gates to concepts of dazzling strangeness. Bioluminescence. Echolocation. Ways of knowing that, as a kid, I held alongside my own senses, imagining what it would be like to have another means of perception.
But for too long I had allowed myself to hold what I remembered lightly, as if my father were a dictionary where I could always look up what I had forgotten. As the years passed without him, I could feel the specificity leeching from my language in the rare moments when I did try to talk about the living world. And how easy to let a term like “bird-watcher” stand in for who my father was, for the experience of walking with him at the lakeshore in the evening, for all the live movements and complications of a person. In the years since his death, I hadn’t added new encounters, or new words, to the archive of experience we once shared. To keep the grief at bay, I held myself apart. And after a while, I felt I was losing him, letting him be consumed by the shorthand of memory. I could play back the tape—a man reaches down into the grass and squeezes a stem of toadflax. The flower opens and shuts like a mouth. The child, who had been whining, laughs.
Nostalgia can be a trap: the present eats the past as it loops on itself, until the act of reaching backward becomes more important than what’s touched. Just when I think I’ve invented my father, I find a slide in a drawer and hold it up to the bright noon sky. I’m there in the frame, perhaps one year old, riding in a pack on his back, turning to stare at the camera. He is facing away, his gaze tipped up, scanning the trees with binoculars. The old stories are true—we were bird-watching before I could talk. But without trying to cultivate my own, present knowledge of a place, these stories alone don’t satisfy me. I wear them away with time, and like statues, they become both polished and shabby.
“It is not possible,” as the writer Barry Lopez puts it, “for human beings to outgrow loneliness.” With time, as I got older and better at suppressing my feelings, my language for the world we’d shared became weaker and weaker, until I could no longer tell the difference between avoiding a memory and forgetting. When I paused to watch the flight of a bird I couldn’t recognize, I was pinned by a namelessness that disturbed me, as if the creature itself were gone. In the end, I decided that if I could not outrun or outgrow longing, then the least I could do was notice it. Some things I’d shared with my father were lost, but I could still go to Cornwall, spend time in the schoolhouse, try to befriend the gaps in my knowledge, relearn what he had taught me. Better to live with the ache than not register what’s missing at all.
*
One of the challenges biologists face is that it’s very difficult to count an absence. Decades can pass between the last confirmed sighting of a species and the presumption that they are extinct. In the meantime, people search for any sign of their song, their markings, their tracks, exhausting the habitats that once sheltered them, trying to distinguish between what’s rare and what’s gone.
On my first morning in the woods, I opened a cabinet and found a pile of my father’s bird books. One was a 1980 edition of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds East of the Rockies with a cardinal on the faded cover. I let the book fall open where the spine had cracked and found a paragraph on the Bachman’s warbler, which the guide called “the rarest North American songbird.”
Even in 1980, though, the last sightings of Bachman’s warblers were more than a decade old. When researchers in the late seventies conducted surveys looking for these birds, they played recordings of their calls to the landscape. At the time, other birds still responded to the sound of the endangered warblers with what the researchers described as “scolding”—as if they might still recognize the territorial nature of the Bachman’s warbler from direct experience.
In 2002, researchers spent 166 hours going over Congaree National Park, where people had reported sightings in the past. A team of scientists and volunteers surveyed 3,900 acres, stopping every four hundred feet to search and to play recorded calls. But they didn’t see or hear any Bachman’s warblers. The researchers also noted that other birds had stopped responding to the calls—as if they no longer recognized their sound. By 2021, the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to “delist” this warbler, removing them from the endangered species category and concluding that these birds have, in all likelihood, become extinct. My father’s guide had offered me a yellow-feathered ghost with a small black patch on its crown.
There’s something eerie about a warbler whose habitat is a field guide, who exists only in drawings. But I like the way some bird books list even the most improbable sightings, offering a hope, if you can call it that, of a kind of resurgence. To leave out the nearly impossible would be anathema to the idea of species checklists, of laying eyes or ears on as many birds as you can in a lifetime. Though these birds are being delisted, the 2020 edition of the Peterson’s guide still includes the Bachman’s warbler. This stubbornness has a kind of beauty—a refusal to admit disappearance, to stop looking for what’s hard to find.
But beyond extinction, there’s another category that’s easier to notice. Birds whose status is rated CBSD, for common bird in steep decline. This group of birds evokes Michael McCarthy’s phrase “the great thinning”—the way familiar species have simply become less numerous, though they remain part of the landscape. A recent study in Science estimates that since 1970, the US has lost nearly three billion birds, an almost 30 percent decline in abundance. As populations of certain birds become smaller, questions emerge about when (and why) a decline reverses or accelerates.
Borrowing from the language of chemicals and pollutants, groups that estimate bird populations have used the concept of a half-life: the number of years until there are half as many birds as there are today. For CBSDs, the estimates can be startlingly short. In 2016, Common grackles were given a half-life of just thirty-three years. If current trends continue, I’ll be in my sixties when half as many grackles strut across grasses at dusk, shimmering like oil slicks in evening light. Chimney swifts, the “flying cigars” of the birder world, have a half-life of twenty-seven years. Blackpoll warblers have just sixteen. But these numbers are warnings, calls for greater action and attention—predictions that don’t have to come true.
*
When numbers are diminishing, what someone counted in the past begins to gather special significance. Along with the field guides, I have a few of my father’s bird lists. These are mainly from the years just before I was born, when my parents stayed in that one-room schoolhouse, where they added a tiny kitchen and a loft for sleeping. In these woods near the Housatonic River, my father spent hours watching birds. Sometime in the early eighties, he began participating in community science bird surveys with a group of volunteers who gathered data for scientists and conservation projects. He would wake up in the early hours and put on his skis or snowcats, combing through the winter woods for owls.
In these years before I was born, he participated in the Christmas Bird Count, the longest running community science bird survey in the US. The count began in 1900, after an ornithologist named Frank Chapman became concerned about sharp declines in several bird species. In New York City, where he worked at the American Museum of Natural History, he noticed that a lot of women were wearing whole birds or feathers on their hats, making the delicate white fronds of egret feathers into an overharvested commodity. And on Christmas Day, some people still organized “side hunts,” where shooting parties would “hie them to the fields and woods on the cheerful mission of killing practically everything in fur or feathers that crossed their path.”
As the editor of Bird-Lore magazine, Chapman argued that this behavior was unsportsmanlike. He proposed a different kind of “friendly” competition. Rather than killing the birds, he argued for a Christmas Bird Census, where groups of people would go out and see how many birds they could count on December 25. He offered to publish the results in his magazine. The first year, twenty-seven volunteers counted a total of ninety species. Over time, the parameters for counting solidified: each survey has to take place on a single day, and no birds can be included other than those seen during the twenty-four-hour period. (Though organizers are allowed to include a supplemental, separate category for species they see during “count week.”) Each area is a fifteen-mile-wide circle, which can be divided into routes depending on the number of teams who participate in that area. Each circle also has a compiler, who gathers all the checklists and notes the “effort” and metadata—how many volunteers came out, for example, how long they worked, and the weather conditions. The team that sees the most species can consider themselves the best birders in the area.
Chapman fulfilled his purpose—the count has become robust enough that scientists continue to use the data gathered by those who participate. The results are now online, going back to 1900, and anyone can search them. Along with data from radar and other counts like the Breeding Bird Survey, which takes place in the spring, scientists and conservationists use the results of the Christmas Bird Count to estimate bird populations and measure which species are increasing or declining over time.
In my father’s era, the count was quite competitive. In theory, anyone could join, but the compilers and route captains often relied on people they knew and trusted, to ensure that their circles produced accurate tallies. If you heard a snippet of a bird’s call, you could count it—you didn’t have to lay eyes on each one. Some people woke up in the early hours to go owling in the snowy woods, and stayed out to catch the dawn chorus. Organizers held potluck dinners late into the night, when the sightings from each route were checked and stats for each group were announced.
I suspect my father got involved with the bird count through his friend Mike Redmond, a seasoned naturalist who lives a little ways up the dirt road that winds past the schoolhouse. Mike’s somewhat retired now, but in those days he was a logger, a caretaker of estates, a trucker who drove racehorses to Belmont and Saratoga. Once, he told me, he got stuck in a blizzard outside Rochester with a load of baby food and subsisted by slurping down a few jars in his cab. Despite sometimes being away for his job, his connection with the rural landscape goes deep, especially when it comes to birds.
When the two men found a great horned owl nest in the woods behind my father’s driveway, it was Mike who set up the spotting scope so they could take a closer look without disturbing the birds. But beyond the easy friendship of two people in a tiny town who share a hobby, they liked going against the grain of each other’s assumptions, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. And my dad was amazed by the beauty of Mike’s drawings. He could pencil the wing muscles of a red-tail without losing their power, and the eyes of his raptors delivered their mile-long stare. It is, I think, an intimacy with these creatures that allows him to draw them so well. He can really see how they maneuver; he’s taken the time to hold their gaze.
Mike once got into trouble on a bird count because he crossed over into another birder’s territory, looking for a Carolina wren. He was listening for the song—teakettle-teakettle-teakettle—when a woman started coming after him with her umbrella. In those days, the Christmas Bird Count in this area had around seventy participants, and together they often put in more than a hundred hours.
The numbers are smaller now, but in other areas they’ve grown. Mike still does the count each year. He says he’ll be doing it when he’s a hundred.
There’s no substitute for his long knowledge of this place— including its human and nonhuman creatures. He remembers the way my dad took notes in the back of his bird book—a copy I’ve never been able to find. When I ran into Mike on the road near his home, more than twenty years had gone by since he’d last seen my father, but he wanted to tell me he’d been thinking about him. And in the scuff of dirt under my feet, I felt the viewpoint shifting, telescoping.
One morning, in the early hours of the 1986 Christmas Bird Count, my father had been out in the dawn woods, looking for owls with Mike. They’d gotten up at 5 a.m., trying to be quiet as their boots broke through the snow crust. They’d already heard two sa whets and the urgent lilt of a great horned owl. After several hours, my dad could barely feel his toes, so he went home to warm up a bit and eat some breakfast before continuing the route. As he crossed out of the tree line, the schoolhouse door flew open and my mother came running out to meet him. She had just taken a pregnancy test. It seemed impossible, but after years of hoping and giving up, they were finally going to have a child.
*
When I began to look more carefully, I knew that some of the birds my father saw would be difficult for me to find. As many times as I walked these rural roads, I’d be hard-pressed to see an evening grosbeak or a purple martin—once-common species that are now rare here. Still, I knew from my translation work that if you want to learn from the dead, you have to visit their places. Just because a living landscape can never be a monument doesn’t mean it can’t hold the fleeting echo of a presence—the way an animal’s shadow moves over grass blades on the ground. I’m stepping on your head, I used to say to him, as I followed him around the evening meadow, trampling through his silhouette. How the absence of light blooms for just a moment in that shadow—in mine, in my father’s, in the wing shapes of every bird—before the grass returns to greenness.
Here the extraordinary feels possible, if elusive. That shadow in the trees could be a crow or the wings of a pileated woodpecker, emerging from a hole in the trunk. That knot in the tree could be a nest healed over. Those feathers, a bobcat’s meal.
When I started relearning the birds, there was so much activity that sometimes it overwhelmed me. I could catch facets of what was happening, like looking through a kaleidoscope at a coral reef. I thought a lot in these early days about the visual grammar of bird-watching—wing bars, eye rings, streaks. Like learning any language, it was humbling. While I retained some foundations from walks with my father, I was rusty. I knew when something looked sparrowish in flight, and the way a flock of starlings shook loose from a tree with a rustle like dead leaves. I knew how red-winged blackbirds perched at the edges of the swamp like sentinels, displaying their bright epaulettes. But I’d forgotten some basic distinctions. How the flight of a goldfinch undulates, how they can seize on the head of a wildflower. How a phoebe’s call is reedy, front-loaded, not sweet like a chickadee’s. Many times I picked up the bird book thinking I’d seen something rare, only to realize what I’d been looking at was completely familiar. Perhaps out of a wish for anecdotal reassurance, I wanted to inhabit this place with the birds whose presence felt precarious before they swerved across my path. But my ear or eye had tricked itself. I’d been caught out by an assumption. I hadn’t known enough context.
When I first spoke French outside a classroom, I’d experienced something similar—a testing of the signs I’d memorized against the living language as it actually moved through the world. Ça se dit pas, someone would say, to correct me. “That’s not how you say it.” But as a stranger in the language, I was shaken by the innate sense of violation in this phrase. That’s not how it says itself; that isn’t how it communicates.
Once, I looked up from my desk, startled at the number of birds I was hearing from a single thicket. In quick succession, I heard a robin, a blue jay, a red-winged blackbird. As the song continued, it was odd that the sounds didn’t overlap—instead, they were rushed together, back-to-back, a chaotic tumble of familiar notes. This remix, I realized, was actually coming from a single gray catbird, a gorgeous mimic of other species whose cobbled-together song can last for ten whole minutes straight. That piling-on of sounds had a particular accent, which is how to tell a catbird apart from the species they copy.
Not long after, I encountered the reverse lesson. Up the road, I heard a blackbird, a blue jay, and the sharp keeeer of a red-tailed hawk. I thought a mimic might be singing. But no, when I got closer, all three species were perched together at the top of a tree. As I turned the corner, the hawk flew off, with the smaller birds hovering in pursuit. I was out of practice at noticing the habits of other species, but it was a relief to study creatures who can be known only in motion, in life, through experience and observation, resisting, at every moment, my attempt to contain them in static images or in words. Each morning, the birds left me off-balance—they turned me inside out.
*
My father, too, had once found a way out of loneliness through birds. As a child, his school evacuated from London during the bombing raids of World War II. At age twelve, he suddenly became a boarder, safe but separated from his parents for months in a dank Bedfordshire country house someone had hastily offered as student housing. Homesickness wasn’t patriotic. When my father moved on to a high school in Dorset, its reputation as “progressive” still included cold baths every morning. And a run before breakfast, which my father actually liked, until some classmates tripped him and he had to pick the gravel out of his knees.
He was happiest alone on long walks through the fields around the school, where he was more likely to meet a blackbird or a local farmer than one of his erstwhile peers. My father told me once that his only friend in those days was a lie—he’d conspired with another unpopular boy to pretend they were close on days when parents visited. His “friend” must have been equally miserable, though, because later that year, he tried to hang himself with his uniform tie.
At seventeen, in the middle of the war, my dad lost his own father. My grandfather had been working for the General Electric Company, racing to develop a radar apparatus that would be compact enough to fit on planes and accurate enough to detect the periscopes of German submarines. This job was high pressure, and his heart was bad. One day the headmaster of the boarding school summoned my father to his office to tell him the news. He heard secondhand that his mother had called from home, that his father was dead, and that she didn’t recommend going to the funeral. There was no other explanation. My father didn’t know what else to do but go back to the cafeteria, where he’d been drinking a cup of powdered hot chocolate. In the time it had taken to talk to the headmaster and return, the cocoa hadn’t even gotten cold.
“As children, we know so little about our parents,” he wrote to me before he died.
We do not know the lives they led before we were born, and seldom see much of the work our fathers and mothers leave home each day to do. We define our parents by their parenting, which means everything to us, but leaves so much out. I never even looked clearly into my father’s face.
The boarding schools of wartime England were no place for grief. He didn’t even tell his teachers or classmates that his father had died. Some found out, and sidled up to him so awkwardly that he ended up comforting them. But by that time he was old enough to have a less demanding school schedule. He could walk in the woods. He could make drawings from old natural history books. And he could watch birds in the field.
*
The first time many birds migrate, they must do it innately, navigating to a place they’ve never been before. There’s still a lot we don’t know about this movement, but one theory is called the clock and compass, meaning that some birds are born with an instinct to move at certain times of the year and a direction they’re driven to travel. Researchers have observed that when birds are in captivity, they will often experience nocturnal restlessness during seasons when they would normally be flying—rustling their wings at night as a manifestation of their instinct to move.
Beyond that first instinctive journey, birds use starlight, the earth’s magnetic field, and other cues like local landmarks. There’s evidence, too, that birds use the polarized light from the sunset to recalibrate their internal compasses on a daily basis. Some use the sun, too, if they’re flying during daylight hours, but most birds migrate at night. The atmosphere is calmer and cooler then, and celestial markers are more visible, especially in places where their glow hasn’t been dimmed by human-created brightness.
Mike told me that he sometimes goes up to Maine during fall migrations so he can watch birds through his scope as they cross the rising moon, identifying them by their silhouettes. When the seasons turned over, I, too, began studying at night, recording calls, out with my binoculars for long hours when I should have been writing, googling late into the morning until I could name everything I’d seen. I wanted to learn the language of field marks and identification, but I didn’t want it to reduce or hollow out the mystery of these interactions with wild birds, these moments when my perception crossed their own.
I shouldn’t have worried. Just by being alone in the woods, walking the paths, I’d already stepped into the thick of things. With each return visit to these woods and fields, patience and noticing come a little more easily. So do observations of other plants and animals. On a walk I note the severed front leg of a deer, its hoof crooked over the low branch of a pine. Bobcat mischief? Or the sign of a human hunt? Fresh death quickly ages, camouflages. Something will come for this hoof, and the last hint of its nourishment will vanish back into the mouth of the summer landscape. Until then, the leg in the tree is an invitation, a trace of decay on the air.
One evening, as I let the dogs out, I notice one of them step hesitantly toward the woods and bark low, a huff under his breath. I call and he comes closer, looking over his shoulder as he pees. Then he runs inside. It’s the hour just before night, when things separate from their shadows and I retreat indoors, conscious of the acre of woods and fields between me and my nearest neighbor. From the doorway of the schoolhouse, I watch as a shape detaches from the black tangle of a toppled tree. At first, it looks like a man in a sweater, bent over, picking something up from the ground. I start to close the door and watch, heart in throat, as his face turns toward me. But it’s a bear’s face, a black bear, and the fear turns to something else entirely.
From my vantage, his movements are slow, deliberate, articulated— he’s a young bear, tall, not too heavy. I see him moving between the trees, then lose him. The mullions are in my way. Ten minutes later, something shifts in the darkness, and he comes through the ferns, passing not ten feet from the window, moving like a condensation of shadows. I wonder if he will look at me, but he doesn’t. Up close, I see the tag in his right ear—like a tag you’d put on a calf. He crosses the field toward the neighbor’s house, vanishing into the tall grass.
After a little while, I start to get ready for bed. I’m still standing by the window, about to step into the shower, naked now, because there’s nowhere else to stand and change in this small room. Then, a shock. Something else is moving out of the woods, and I hold up the cutoffs I’d been folding to cover myself, as if this animal, this wild mind, could somehow care about nakedness.
This time it’s a she-bear who comes through the ferns. The male must have been her yearling cub. She’s bigger, heavier, untagged— nothing managed or tame—just a life-force that trundles and pauses when she feels my gaze on her. I follow her to the next window and again she pauses, though the lights are off at this transitional hour. She stands for a moment at the top of the hill, ringed by a brittle constellation of fireflies. And then she, too, disappears into the neighbor’s field.
As I fall asleep, I think of her in the greenish darkness of the woods, the blurred edge of her fur-shadow. How she caught me in a kind of vulnerability, without armor. How I felt the intensity of her presence, the opposite of a human supremacy.
After you see something once, you know where to look, how to listen—you’re sensitized to see it again. A few days later, out walking and looking for birds, I hear a deep rustle at the edge of the road and freeze. An earlier version of myself might have kept walking, but I wait for the sound to resolve into whatever is coming—some animal, something big. This time, when the young bear crosses the road, I’m about fifteen feet away, and there are no walls between us. Pulse under my jaw, heart flying out of my chest. I reach up my arms to look as big as possible. The deerflies take advantage of my stillness, but I barely notice their bites. The bear looks back at me and lopes away. But something tells me to wait for his mother, not wanting to get in between them, not wanting to test the trigger of that rescue distance, that invisible tie. Sure enough, a few minutes later, she shuffles out of the roadside brush. I’m still frozen, arms overhead, fingers tingling. Up close, she’s slower, more discerning. We look at each other across one whole, suspended minute, but then she, too, turns her back and walks away. And I realize the worst fear was just before the encounter began to play itself out, before we knew how we would act toward each other, before we all knew that here, at least in this one moment, our paths could cross without harm.
*
As I write this, I wonder if, in teaching me about birds, my father was actually teaching me how to unlearn loneliness. Telling me that though it may be impossible to step entirely outside human ways of understanding our surroundings, I should still value the longing to try. Giving me the key to a more-than-human world, the world that had comforted him after the death of his own father, who died at fifty-six.
My father was sixty when I was born. Just a few years later, he was diagnosed, although his cancer treatments were mild enough that, as a child, I didn’t notice a marked change in his vitality. Still, there were many things he kept to himself. As I drifted away into teenage years, he began to visibly sicken.
We spent less time in the woods, in the schoolhouse cabin, though when we did, we still walked at the blue hour down to the swamp where swallows dipped over the water, touching the surface like daredevil pilots. Cut hay in the air, the buzz of flies. Clusters of asters and yellow toadflax, which we called butter and eggs. Beavers swam between flooded clumps of thicket, making a dark furrow in the reflection of the sky. As the reeds in the swamp lost their definition, we stood backlit at the edge of the road until the male beaver noticed us and clapped his tail against the surface—a warning that we’d gotten too close.
On one of our last walks through the woods, my father’s foot snagged a tree root, and as he fell, his reflexes failed to catch him. Out of sheer luck, he wound up with nothing worse than shallow cuts to the face, forming a wide scab across his chin and the bridge of his nose. It was my freshman year of college, parents’ weekend. Eight months later he was dead.
I didn’t know then that it would take me nearly fifteen years to come back to the birds, to walk down to the vernal pools at dusk, to listen to the pull of this landscape and accept that its abundance could carry his traces. To pick up binoculars and the threads of a long-paused conversation. What he saw, what I could see.
This piece is an excerpt from The Age of Loneliness, an essay collection out this week from Graywolf Press.
Laura Marris is a writer and translator. She is a MacDowell fellow and the recipient of a Silvers Grant for Work in Progress. She teaches creative writing at the University of Buffalo.
