I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  You’ve seen shorebirds standing around in groups on the beach and maybe thought they were loafing without particular purpose. But between forays to fish, shorebirds need time undisturbed to rest, regroup, and dry, reorder, and oil their feathers. They don’t hide from us. They simply try to remain in the only places they can live, but we crowd them, we push them away. That’s if we notice them at all.

  Jeff and I set up my spotting scope a good distance away from the hundreds of birds resting at the spit and began to scan.

  Royal tern, 110. Forster’s tern, 97. Caspian tern, 2. Sandwich tern, 2.

  I named off the birds and numbers of each kind out loud, so Jeff could record them in a small, waterproof notebook.

  Black skimmer, 57. American oystercatcher, 3. Cormorant, 9. Brown pelican, 2.

  I inherited my territories on Cape San Blas and St. Vincent from a petite, supremely businesslike birder named Barbara Stedman. In 2009, when I met Barbara, she’d already been keeping tabs along this stretch of north Florida coast for more than thirty years. While Barbara and thousands of other citizen scientists have been watching, their data show us that since 1967, absolute numbers of common birds have steeply declined. Some species have nosedived as much as 80 percent, including the northern bobwhite (quail). Many—like evening grosbeaks, mead-owlarks, and several kinds of duck—have lost 50 to 70 percent of their population in just four decades. Those Christmas Bird Count data have been ominously corroborated in “Decline of the North American Avifauna,” a September 2019 report in Science magazine. The authors point out that extinction begins with loss in abundance of individuals, which profoundly affects ecosystem function. Since 1970, the report finds that our continent has suffered population losses of more than 20 million terns and gulls, and more than 15 million sandpipers.

  The losses, they slew me. Whenever I walked on a beach, my mind took refuge in counting—actually, first checking to see if there were enough birds to count. And always, I knew, that what I observed: say twelve red knots, eight ruddy turnstones, twenty-five sanderlings was but a fraction of what should be. Instead, I’d focus on what still lived, not what was lost.

  A red Jeep came rolling down the sand, and several couples on foot moved toward us from the west.

  “Jeff, quick, run between the birds and car tracks in the sand so the people will have to go around us,” I asked, and he did. I pressed the legs of my scope more firmly into the beach. It looked like a stiff, mutant, three-legged spider. As if in a football game, we body-blocked for the birds.

  Willet, 4. Dunlin, 41. Western sandpiper, 10. Ruddy turnstone, 5.

  Most people driving or even walking the beach will respect a human’s unspoken right to be where they will on the shore, and as I had guessed, these beach drivers circled around us to give us space.

  Black-bellied plover, 1. Snowy plover, 7. Semi-palmated plover, 6. Piping plover, 3.

  These same polite people may not have realized the nonnegotiable needs and extreme vulnerability of shorebirds. How would they respond if they knew that these very shorebird species had suffered such a rapid decline? And that our dogs and our cars are a large part of what’s driving down their numbers?

  As the beachgoers moved on, my concern for the birds relaxed. They were no longer numbers nor species threatened by human activity. They simply stopped me with their magnificent beauty. A royal tern chick, bowing to and begging from its parent, for food. Northern-breeding Bonaparte’s gulls, with white-trimmed wings and scrappy dispositions. A black skimmer, so tired it might have fallen face down in the sand, except for its massive bill acting as a prop. I found myself suspended between the divinity of the birds and their utter vulnerability to human whims.

  It was easier the next day, counting on remote and protected St. Vincent Island, a national wildlife refuge. I stood on the lip of West Pass, facing a warm wind and the rising sun; at my back, miles of salt marsh spread to the sky. I scuffed through the short grasses with my boots, hoping to herd sparrows toward the other birders in my party. Three different species of marsh sparrows piled up like Christmas tree ornaments in one small, skeletal shrub, long enough to clearly be identified. Using our bird apps and guides, we compared size and shape, nape and crown color, breast-belly contrast, and various streakings and stripes. I had studied hard for the sparrows, precount. Imagine the joy, then, of a chance to easily distinguish a seaside from a Nelson’s from a saltmarsh sparrow. Heaven.

  At Sheepshead Bayou, I trained my binoculars on a group of white wading birds standing at the water’s edge. I needed to confirm that they were all snowy egrets before I added them to the day’s growing list. My team members had turned their backs and were tallying bufflehead ducks, horned grebes, and common loons in the lagoon. They entirely missed the next miracle.

  Magnified in my binoculars’ field of view, a full-grown, soaking-wet otter emerged from the salt water and shouldered a path through the gathered egrets (nine snowy, one great). For all the world, it was as if the otter spoke to the birds: Make way, make way. I’ve important business over in the marsh! The egrets kerfuffled their wings and stepped out of the mammal’s path. It humped briskly over the white sand and dropped into the juncus marsh, out of sight.

  I admit I let out a little scream of excitement. I love this world so much. We have to name the things we will not relinquish. Counting is important—knowing how David was doing in school, knowing my dad’s medical status, understanding how bird populations were trending, these things were important. But I suspected that numbers didn’t change outcomes. For that we would need to dig into cause. The job I really wanted to sign up for was advocating for this world and the living things I cherished.

  CHAPTER 10

  Resistance (Only Leads to Suffering)

  I did not want the life of the grown daughter who tended her invalid mother in the room next door to Dad’s. Every single afternoon at five-thirty, the small woman would come bearing a fragrant paper sack from a fast food chain. She would wheel her mother to the dining room, cut her institutionally prepared dinner into manageable bites, and then unwrap a hamburger and french fries for herself. After they’d both eaten, the daughter would wheel her mother back to her room and gently close the door. The television they watched would talk through Dad’s walls until nine o’clock, or later.

  That wasn’t the kind of arrangement I wanted. I craved long summer evenings walking the neighborhood with Jeff in the open air, watering our garden, cooking dinner from the vegetables we grew, sharing a beer on our own front porch. My father wanted that too, of course. But his immobility didn’t allow for it.

  Outside Dad’s window, kudzu vines continued to erase the light. The growing season would last until first frost, around Christmas. I couldn’t remember what that little woodland had looked like in spring. A friendly, very deaf little woman across the hall explained why she had moved out of my father’s room before we took possession. “I hated the unnatural shade and how dark the room became every summer,” she said.

  “I really ought to take a chainsaw to that kudzu,” I said to my dad. “Or pay someone to knock it back so the trees won’t die.” Dad didn’t comment. The kudzu’s regrowth felt so inevitable, I didn’t take it on.

  Another day. “Sue, I’m going to live to be 110,” announced my father when I walked in his door. “But I’m kind of at wit’s end. I’m not really sure what I should do with the small amount of time I’ve got left.”

  We had done the things I could think of, the tasks that Mary Jane had been too frail to accomplish. We’d been to the doctor, the ophthalmologist, the dentist, the oral surgeon, the gerontologist. But given the limitations of his disease, we couldn’t do the things I’d imagined would help pass the time: play cards or watch long movies or adventure out in the car. He seemed muted, even less joyful to see me. His emotional register felt compressed.

  And I felt like I was metering out my own life energy when I matched myself to his pace: pulling on his socks, solving staffing issues, walking alon
gside him to the bathroom, ever so languidly. I’d have to check my active body and mind at the door when I visited my father, and I could feel the pulse of my own purpose, my words, my desires, beating against his needs. We’d done this for four months, but how much time lay ahead? Dad’s announced prospect of a long life ahead made me feel as if I’d quietly lose my mind.

  I quartered a pale-skinned honeydew melon I had brought from the store. The bigger chunks I slid between Dad’s forefinger and thumb so that he could ferry the fruit to his mouth. The smaller ones, the scraps, I hand fed him. I called my sister and Uncle Don, but neither answered the phone.

  Dad worked at the Band-Aid on his elbow. He slapped his thigh. He rubbed circles on the fabric of his pants, a habitual gesture now. He slipped into a light doze in his chair.

  Like an animal in a cage, I felt my soul compressed by the room’s small dimensions. He surely did too. I knew my resistance to sitting in that room was only a fraction of how hard it was for him to be inside his own diminished state. I was beginning to despair of the daily visits, even though his joy—“Sue, you are here!”—would snap me back to the present and into the connection of our hearts. But much as I loved my father and despite a lifetime of connection, right now, for me, I didn’t need to be with him more than two or three times a week.

  There he was, lodged in a backwater of a sluggish creek of the end of his life. I had been alone all day writing and editing and I felt restless, and I didn’t want to raft along at my dad’s infinitesimally slow pace.

  I opened and closed each drawer of Dad’s dresser and desk, looking for something to organize. I pulled out his checkbook to settle his small accounts.

  I thought about a recent dream in which I wheeled my father in his chair into the facility’s elevator. We only wanted to go to the second or third floor, perhaps to the exercise class, but the elevator continued up, up, up. We couldn’t get off. The numbers on the flashing digital indicator began to light up in confusing patterns. Finally, it stopped at the forty-seventh floor. But the elevator door was stuck. We couldn’t go back down or get off. For how long could this continue?

  Dad opened his eyes. “What are you doing, Sue?”

  “Paying our bills,” I replied.

  “I’m going to take off my shoes now.” Dad began to twitch and tug the legs of his gray sweatpants, hips to knees to ankles.

  “Do you have to pee?”

  “Yes,” he grunted. It was no more fun for him than for me. I grabbed the plastic urinal and a cloth to mop any spills and buzzed the electric recliner all the way flat.

  I helped him bend his knees, so he could lift his rump in a version of yogic bridge. He didn’t comment or complain.

  But his feet wobbled and drifted, and reflexively, he crossed his thin right leg over his left. He couldn’t hold the posture, which was the only way I knew for sure I could help him pee without summoning an aide from the hall.

  “Dad, can you lift your bottom, please, so I can help you down with your pants?” I readjusted his limbs.

  He said yes. But he didn’t raise his torso.

  I touched his hip bone, thinking a physical cue might help. “Lift from here, Dad,” I said.

  We passed a full thirty minutes helping Dad get in position so that I could edge his pants over his hips, pull down his diaper, and position the pee bottle, only to discover the diaper already sodden, requiring that we somehow shimmy it out and replace it. It wasn’t his usefulness I questioned, but my own. The work I was doing for him didn’t feel like kindness or a gift, because I was so restless at my core. And certainly, it didn’t feel like healing.

  I was not writing, not organizing or advocating, and moreover Dad didn’t even need to urinate after all. It felt as though we were moving ever so slightly in place, “as slow as molasses in January,” as both my mother and father used to say.

  Concentrate on why you are here, I’d tell myself. Remember, this isn’t your full-time job. I was only with Dad four or five times a week, only a couple dozen hours of physical tending, plus shopping, phone calls, and appointments. But much as I loved him, I was bored.

  Watching wild birds live out their purposes is my own life purpose. Photo by Rob Diaz de Villegas.

  I didn’t feel bored when I sat with wild birds. I never did. My favorite thing was to find a resting clot of shorebirds and nestle into a dune to watch them go about their lives. On a recent day, the flock included dozens of Caspian terns intermingled with black skimmers. The sand where they stood was compacted by hundreds of tern and pelican toes. Royal terns were off to themselves. Pairs of laughing gulls mated; a south-borne wind lifted their feathers. Sanderlings and a few black-bellied plovers stepped through the crowd.

  On the outskirts of the colony, I spied a single roving snowy plover chick. On long spindled legs, the chick investigated the beach all alone, its voice trilling a tiny stream of audible bubbles. He resembled a little marshmallow Easter chick, except covered with gray and buff down, instead of yellow sugar. No tail, no feathers at all, a soft white cowl on the back of his neck. I watched him stop to scratch his chin with a naked black foot.

  I couldn’t tell if that tiny chick alerted when the skimmers rose and circled, when their light nasal background honking shifted to a louder, more urgent waah waah waah. What and how did the chick know to fear? It could not know, as I did, that it had come highly endangered into a highly endangered world.

  The parent plover knew. It flew back from the water’s edge to drive away a sanderling that had ventured too close to its young one; I hadn’t thought of a sanderling as a threat. If I were able to visit the birds only once in a great while, I wouldn’t feel the rhythm of their lives, nor witness the coast processing through its intricate seasonal and geological changes. I needed to be with them, to see for myself what was at stake.

  As the adult plover skirmished with the sanderling, its chick took refuge under a small green dune plant. When the adult returned, the chick beelined to its parent and burrowed into the feathers of its breast. The newly hatched plover chick came into its world possessed of a bold life force. Plover chick, plover parent, and every other creature out there on that beach by swelling Gulf waters do nothing but fully live their purpose. I wanted to rise up every morning and do the same.

  Away ran the plovers, speeding over the sand. I sensed that the parent was rushing the chick past a laughing gull standing close by, which seemed smart. Even I knew the laughing gull meant danger. I was left alone with the little bird’s tracks. The creature carried so little weight. Its prints were whispers in the sand. I felt deeply happy to experience a short window into a plover’s life and to sit quietly near the rare birds I loved so much. To witness, be present. This is my sacred profession: to be with the birds and then tell their stories.

  Sometimes on a slow summer evening when I was a child, my father would become a bird. He would lean back in his chair and push away from the long kitchen table in our rented beach cottage. He would tighten the muscles of his belly and thighs, straighten his knees and lift his legs. He’d press his feet close together and point his toes. He would throw out his arms as if they were wings and pretend to glide.

  Through tightly pursed lips, he’d whistle, “Wheeeee!” He’d ask, “Guess what I am?” We children would whoop and scream at the unexpected oddness of the moment and urge him on, the way he was playing, mimicking the cry and float of the laughing gull.

  It was a solo act. Dad never suggested we join in, never expected anything at all from the eight or nine of us at dinner. “It just came over me,” maybe he’d say that much. You could take it as a joke. You could take it as a tribute. He never explained. He’d pick up his beer and resume his banter with our Uncle Frank. We kids would clear the table for cards.

  Outside in the dark salt night, on once wide and sufficient beaches, the real birds—the plovers, the terns, the oystercatchers—would be raising their chicks.

  But we didn’t know about that. Way back then, the laughing gull was
the only seabird I knew by name and habit. We should have known better and more, given the many weeks we spent at the Jersey shore, and on North Carolina’s Hatteras Island. For us, the shore and sea birds were decorative, and the beaches (their essential habitats), our playground. We loved the wild birds, wouldn’t have wanted to imagine the world without them, but we had no idea what they required to prosper, nor how our runaway culture was affecting their lives.

  With my shoulder, I shoved open the Landing’s front door. From my right hand swung a red net bag of single-serving cheeses. In the crook of the other arm, I juggled an enormous box of adult diapers. Just inside the lobby I was happy to see Gretchen, my good friend, ferrying supplies to her own dad, Woody, who had recently, against his will, moved into the Landing. We dropped our packages and fiercely hugged.

  Gretchen was a beautiful woman: long-limbed and graceful, a great blue heron with glossy black hair. She was a yoga teacher, a mother of three, a schoolteacher, and one of the most adventurous of my friends. We had spent many days with our young children kayaking, swimming, and camping on rivers and Gulf beaches. She was a dancer too, and her father’s aging enforced a terrible inertia on her own body that I recognized in myself.

  Yet the prospect of spending time with my old friend and our fathers made me glad. I imagined it might be like the slow times we had shared nursing and playing with our children, cooking meals. But Gretchen was teaching full-time, so most of her visits were in the evening. I looked in on Woody whenever I walked past his room. Any hour of day, he was likely to be sleeping on his single bed, his head slanted awkwardly on the pillow, his left arm dangling almost to the floor. Even my own father didn’t sleep as much as Woody. We all agreed he seemed depressed.

  Woody much preferred the many months he had lived with Gretchen in her tiny house, but it was too small to share indefinitely, and his needs for human contact were too great to fasten on only one person, this daughter, no matter how generous her heart. She felt crowded out of her own space. Woody’s hearing was limited, so he filled her house with Fox News from nine in the morning until nine at night, loud. Gretchen’s preference, left to herself, would have been quiet music, or even better, pure silence.