There’s another “rain event” happening right now, rain for the last three days and rain for three more, so when the sky broke a bit, I knew I had to mobilize before the downpour started again. Even with all the rain, people on eBird had been reporting so many firsts this week. The first of the tree swallows. The first of the yellow-rumped warblers. And the lingering, too, of the redhead pair, feasting on the algae bloom in the lagoon, the rusty feathers and blue beak gleaming in the brief fragments of sunlight. My knees and my ankles have been angry lately, protesting against the stress in my brain, but I took the two buses and the walk anyway. I didn’t bring an umbrella, because I didn’t feel like carrying one, and I watched the sky nervously as I hurried over from the bus stop.
The lagoon looked a little more sparsely populated than it had been when we’d seen it last week, back when we had some sunshine. The scaups were scattered around, and even the ever-present mallards seemed to be less populous. I paused on the path for a moment, watching a hooded merganser dive for tiny fish, and as I got moving again — who knew when it might start raining? — a woman walking the opposite direction stopped me. “Excuse me,” she said, “were you taking a picture of that bird?”
I hadn’t been taking a picture, and there were a few birds around us. “The bird with the white head?”
“Yes, yes!” She pointed at the merganser, who had just emerged from the water, and was looking particularly goofy as a result. “It’s so beautiful.”
“It’s a hooded merganser.”
“Amazing! A hooded…”
“Merganser.”
“Amazing,” she repeated, “thank you!”
I started taking the time to notice birds during the darkest parts of the pandemic lockdown — winter 2020, when the world was silent and small. The only way I could see my friends was by going for walks. We always went to the same place, because we wanted to stay off the bus as much as possible, and there, at the pond, the birds that we saw every day became the familiar faces of my everyday life. It only seemed right to learn their names, who they were, just as you would with the person you chat with at the bus stop every morning, or the barista at the coffee shop you always go to. I had known, as a child, that these creatures were part of my community. I forgot, and then, in one of the bleakest moments of my life, I saw that they were still there, just as they had always been, even while I had ignored them. When I needed to stay tethered to the world somehow, I recognized them, and I remembered.
And as I stopped, more and more, to recognize and name the living things around me, I noticed others who stopped, too. Sometimes they were there for the same reason I was — people who had known the birds for years, who could tell me things I didn’t yet know about them. Often, they were people like myself, who had just stopped to notice something that had been in the corner of their eye for years. From our safe distance, they would say — do you see that? Do you know what that is? And I could answer. Another tether, thin but strong, reaching between us and the living things that surrounded us.
I found the redheads halfway around the lagoon. They were a little more distant this time, farther out from the groups of scaups diving. But down at the end of the lagoon, the trees were suddenly bursting with life — the frantic, curious dipping and diving of ruby-crowned kinglets, dozens of them, more than I had ever seen in one place. They would fly out from their branches and then swoop back, and I was reminded, in their movements, of last spring, standing out in the rain in the marsh, as I learned for the first time to recognize the flight patterns and songs of yellow-rumped warblers. It was waterfowl that first captured my attention in 2020 — plentiful as they are around here in the winter, charismatic, and easy to spot. Learning the voices of these small, fluttery birds, who fly thousands of miles to stay here for a few months every year, was a different feeling entirely. Ducks are hard not to notice, but you could walk through a marsh full of hundreds of warblers and never really spot one. You can’t just keep your eyes on the path. You have to stop completely. You have to be still, silent, and let them speak to you.
They were here somewhere, I knew, and I thought I could hear one, somewhere deeper in the shrubbery, by the edge of the water, where I couldn’t see them — the little trill, the flicker of sudden movement. I cut into a little muddy path through the branches, the song of the warbler getting closer and closer, until the path ran out near the edge of the water, deep in the bare branches. I stopped and listened. I heard them, so close that they seemed to be right beside me, moving closer and closer.
The longer I waited, the more it seemed like the yellow-rumped warbler wasn’t going to appear to me. It was so close, but I knew if I tried to press my way through the bushes I would scare it away. I was tired, ready to call it a day — at least I had heard it — and give up.
And then: the tiniest movement in the corner of my eye. I lifted my binoculars up to my eyes, and there it was, jumping between branches, its throat swelling with the now-familiar song. I noted it down in eBird: yellow-rumped warbler, first of the year.
I stayed there, watching it as it flitted around, for ten more minutes. The afternoon was starting to fade, though, and it was time to go. I noticed, as I left, that there was a man, still and silent, holding a camera, deep in the bushes as I had been, his focus entirely on some bird I couldn’t see. Maybe he’d been there the entire time: both of us, surrounded by life, as the sky continued its descent into grey.