I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  “Just tell me what to do to save Florida,” she said. “Just write that down for me.”

  I have been plotting and working and writing my way toward that question my whole adult life. And yet, Florida, and my state’s wildlife, the Earth herself—all the things I dearly loved and wished I could protect—seem no closer to being “saved” than they were before I began. Perhaps saving is the wrong verb.

  A man—white, heavyset, dressed in a pumpkin-orange shirt—raised his hand from the back of an auditorium in Clearwater, Florida. There was a logo stitched on his breast pocket, but he stood so far back in the darkened rows of chairs, I couldn’t read the words, or the expression on his face. I wondered if he was a heckler or a fan. My talk had been wide ranging: Standing Rock, climate change, the Trump administration’s attacks on the environment, and need for urgent, radical change.

  His question: What is the single most important thing that every one of us should do right now, given all that confronts us?

  I pulled down deep inside myself for an answer.

  What I said: Don’t turn away. Face what threatens the unborn of all species with all of your strength and all of your heart.

  Sometimes, that can be a beautiful thing. The first week of August offered me and Jeff an unexpected respite from summer’s heat. It was windy and cool at the coast, so we took our boat to the far end of the refuge and rafted in the shade of Cabbage Top for the longest time. This small floating cathedral had been the first place I had truly come to terms with the irrevocable rise of the sea. But still, we returned to it, and always it was lovely. This particular day, the palms talked and talked in the wind. Hordes of small dragonflies used the protection of the palm fronds, as we did, to stay in place. On every horizon, cumulus storms columned to the sky.

  Our task is to watch over the world with such care.

  One fall day, Jeff and I searched out the last snowy plover chick hatched on the refuge that season. In her small roving body rested the last chance that year for our landscape to contribute to a continuity of plovers, a single bird begun as an egg laid on this very sand.

  I’d seen that chick and her parent on an earlier survey one week before, near the outfall of Oyster Creek. Just now, though, the beach seemed empty of everything but trash, and more trash. We picked up two enormous loads of plastic bottles and balloons in the green net fish bags we keep for that purpose. We saw no chick. I assumed she had been snatched by gull or ghost crab, vanished like all the others this season into the belly of a predator.

  We circled back toward the east, toward Little St. George Island, to continue our search. And there she was, flashing across the strand, her tiny body skittering and zooming as she snapped at small flies. We followed her path with our binoculars, and she led us to a glorious surprise: 150 black terns, paused on their southbound journey to winter on the coast of South America. To my eye, they resembled small ebony sails temporarily furled. Sleek and gray and unexpected on the white of our sand. I’d never seen so many before.

  It was a good place for that plover chick, threading through those black terns and a handful of others—least, Caspian, royal, gull-billed—all paused on the outer edge, between their summer and winter lands. I saw many fewer ghost crabs on the evanescent edge; the absence of their swift claws would give the chick a better shot at survival. Still: the last of the chicks, the last of the black terns.

  In the 1920s, Arthur Bent described the black tern as the “most widely distributed, the most universally common, and most characteristic summer resident of the sloughs, marshes and wet meadows of the [Dakota] plains.” Since the 1960s, black terns have been declining at the rate of 2 or 3 percent each year. I have seen them only here and on the leading edge of Little Saint George, their wings beating while the tips of their toes still touched the refuge, which was disappearing as well.

  My husband, Jeff, with our boat at Cabbage Top, St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge. Photo by the author.

  And yet, would I turn away from them? Never. We must linger longer, watching the beautiful things, watch them with exquisite attention, praying that their spirits will inform our actions on their behalf and our own.

  As the sun began to angle into the sea, I thought about how our planet and our sun had created such palettes on uncounted nightfalls, long before these plovers or I had come to be. Earth has turned in far lonelier eons, without bird or human. I staggered under a gratitude so weighty that I had to sink to my heels, for I had the privilege to share this time with the creatures I loved.

  The flaming sun lit up the whole of my face. The wind lifted my hair. I closed my eyes and became simply another breathing presence on the sand. No boundaries.

  In our saltwater and bones bodies, each one of us loves the birds this much. They have companioned us through the Holocene, weavers of current and nest cup. Their songs were our first music as a species, their call notes the first living patterns on our collective human eardrum. We learned percussion from the woodpecker and to scream from the eagle and to sing complicated melody from the warbler and the thrush.

  Just as our bodies are constructed of the dust of stars, they also carry the memory of a time when our lives were always with the birds, out under the spread of the sky. A time when we lived without separation.

  Bill McKibben, perhaps the most effective and tireless advocate in the United States on the issue of climate change, says this: “How do you cope with celebrating a dying world when you think you should be trying to save it? You—we—are required to bear witness to it. This is one of our jobs. It’s as close to religious duty as one could imagine.” We must keep watch over these beautiful lives and pray for directions to inform our actions on their behalf and our own.

  How is the dementia we are inflicting on our world similar to a dementing illness in a single human brain? It is this: in both cases, the afflicted suffer from the paradigm of perpetual growth, the smothering and overexploitation of diversely beautiful and unprotected, common resources. In human dementia, the losses are painfully observable. One by one the life forces are dissolved. Dancing, laughing, smiling, problem solving, remembering and imagining, and eventually breathing are all stolen from the individual.

  For the Earth, the dementing disease—our system of economic and political dominance—has terminated the Cenozoic era, the time of this planet’s maximum flowering and biodiversity, and replaced it with the largest extinction event in sixty-five million years. One million species have been already lost and replaced with a spiraling increase in human biomass. Industrial civilization has induced an apparently unstoppable climate crisis of epic proportions.

  In his last years, we did for our father everything we could, with the full and gathering knowledge of the eventual outcome. We knew he would die and he did. Is our Earth also terminally ill? Does the human-induced pace of species extinction and climate crisis ensure that we will also lose our Mother?

  I believe that we can redeem our species. As Amitav Ghosh has written, the derangement of our times is rooted in how we live. That’s the difference between my father’s illness and the illness of the Earth: the latter is animated by cumulative human actions, guided by legal and economic systems that treat the natural world as property to be exploited, not as an ecological partner. It follows that we can mitigate, to some extent, the wounding of our planet’s climate and biodiversity. Transforming our culture, our assumptions, our worldview, our cosmology of separation, our economies—that is the single bird we must heal.

  But the work has to start now, and it has to be swift. The systems of power that have done the damage will not lead, nor should they be allowed. We’re on our own, but we are billions.

  Acknowledgments

  My uncle Don Isleib walked the journey with his brother every single day. Those two men shared a lifetime companionship, and from their example, many of us have forged our own. Uncle Don, we love you so.

  I honor my siblings, who shared the love and lives of our father and mother: Roberta Isleib,
Doug Isleib, and Martha Taylor. There wasn’t a day when my sister Bobbie failed to call and consult and console and support Dad and me. My brother-in-law John Brady grounded us. Our cousins and grandchildren understand the privilege of being born into this lineage. I am grateful for all my human relations, especially Elise Smith, Hannah and Asa Canter, Erin Canter, Rachel Williams, and Casey and Patrick Chanton.

  I honor the work of all the caregivers who eased my father’s last years. Faithfulness is their true name, but they also go by Esmine McCormick, Jill Welch, Gail Daly, Shirley M., and Beulah A. An army of women and men dedicate their lives to the care of our elders, and we owe them far better pay and working conditions than they currently receive.

  Dr. Ken Brummel-Smith is a guiding force in the field of aging and death with dignity. We leaned on his honesty and strength, as have so many others.

  I believe I remember every single kindness extended to us during the years we cared for Dad. Special gratitude to Norine Cardea, Ann Morrow, Velma Frye, Julie Morris, Crystal Wakoa, David Moynahan, Rebecca Clemens, Martha Paradeis, Barry Fraser, Lucy Ann Walker-Fraser, Gretchen Hein, Tom and Margaret Clark, Donna Klein, Terry Schneider, the Grambor family, and my Womenspirit sisters.

  I thank my first readers and my writing companions. For believing in my pages: Roberta Isleib, Mary Jane Ryals, Kathleen Laufenberg, Donna Decker, Wilderness Sarchild, and Amrita Brummel-Smith. Thank you, Eileen Albrigo. The counsel and love of Janisse Ray is essential to my writing and advocacy work in the world. Deena Metzger is more important to me than I can say. Lou Cross, I still miss our long creative partnership.

  Our family is grateful to the staff of Big Bend Hospice—music therapists, social workers, clergy, and nurses—for their personal attention. We were so lucky to partake of their services in those years. The Reverend Candace McKibben is the kindest, most generous person I know, and she released Dad from this world spiritually, in his last hours.

  It was a great gift to bury my father at the Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery near Gainesville, Florida, where sandhill cranes stalk and swallow-tailed kites soar, a place that considers land and resources and reunites people with the Earth. Freddie Johnson was our compassionate guide.

  I am so very grateful (all of us should be) for those who spend their lives stewarding the wild birds and places on this burning, besieged planet. Too many to name, every single one a hero. We must all join their ranks fighting climate change and stemming biodiversity losses.

  James Patrick Allen, Jon Davies, and all the staff at the University of Georgia Press make so many important, beautiful books, year after year after year. I know how lucky I am to birth yet another volume with them. May we continue.

  Thank you to my beloved son, David. I honor your courage, your honesty, your persistence, your love, and how you brought Hannah and Asa into our lives. You said: “Mom, I think you are writing this book to stay connected to Grandpa.” You were right.

  Jeff, thank you for walking the path of life with me so well and truly. I am so grateful for our partnership.