Buried Birds

Elizabeth Bradfield

“Buried Birds” originally appeared in Issue 17 of Tahoma Literary Review.

—

There is no other word than love to describe what surges through me when I see a sooty shearwater gliding stiff-winged over the waves. The way they tilt in flight, each wingtip in turn nearly cutting into the glassy, reflective surface, reminds me of kids playing “airplane,” holding their arms out to either side, running and banking. It reminds me of the freedom a child-body has—my child-body had. The delight from the wind’s rush my own speed created, the almost dizzying sway, the expansive sense of loft, the un-selfconsciousness. I remember actually feeling that I was flying, that my imitation somehow embodied that freedom. When a shearwater glides by, all those sensations echo up, and they are undergirded by my adult knowledge of shearwaters’ annual record-shattering, looping path around the Pacific Ocean basin. But the thrum in me is more than intellectual admiration or appreciation.

It’s not only the shearwaters that move me. Other pelagic species do the same.

Working as a naturalist aboard a small boat in the Gulf of California one winter, after hours on deck staring at water, I suddenly spotted a Xantus’s murrelet. Even though I’d never before seen one, the squat, compact body and two-tone coloration were unmistakable. A murrelet! This far south! I knew that we were in their range, but in my mind, alcids are inextricably associated with the chill of northern waters. For years I’d hoped to see one there, in Baja, and now the very thing was before me. “Alcid!” I shrieked in a high, uncool, and very over-excited voice.

Everyone on the bow startled, turned and looked at me. Carlos began laughing, but I didn’t care. I was pumped through with adrenaline. Heart racing, pectoral muscles tingling, I felt like I’d erupted with joy. Is this what being struck by lightning (when it’s not fatal) is like?  It seemed that shocking, that bright and electrified.

I used to think that I loved pelagic birds—petrels, razorbills, albatross—because they spend most of their lives at sea. Because many, such as the albatrosses, can sleep on the wing. Or because those like the murre can fly to great depths underwater.

All of that is true. And yet it’s not only the true pelagics that I love.

It’s the gulls, terns, and even the “shag rats” (a local name for double-crested cormorants) and boobies.

I am glad to tease through the early years of gull plumage, an exercise akin to puzzling through Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, as I did when I was a girl.

Jaegers dogfighting a tern? Yes, please.

I love sea birds because of their differences from “regular” land-based birds. Because most have long-term pair bonds, long lives, shared parenting duties, and little sexual dimorphism. They spend much of the year apart, then come together for an intense period to (hopefully) rear a chick or two in a dense community of their kind. They know both water and air and travel vast, open distances. The option of a different conventionality—another way of life—first appealed to me as a young queer woman who knew that the examples she saw around her on land would not guide her. These different birds were beautiful. There could be a different way of thriving.

But above and beyond even all these details, my heart is held most fully by the pelagic birds who hide their lives on land. The ones like prions who bury themselves to lay an egg, whose chicks hunker in the dark until fledging or trundle out to sea before they can even fly. These birds know how dangerous our element—earth—can be.

I never tire of watching them.

The Blinds Must be Closed by Dusk

In for the night. Porthole a raven’s eye glinting back the lit lamp. Forgot before dinner to shade it. From bird’s eye, outside, this glass disc I look to & through appears a moon which could but didn’t this time tempt petrel or prion, birds that rush from burrow to wave. Know the danger of transitions. Are moth-like toward light. But all the same and despite my forgetting once again no morning call to release a thing towel-wrapped & box-burrowed by A on night watch.

 

illicit hope:

one flumbles to deck lights &

then, savior, I hold one

 

Nothing lured. No memory of anything leaving my hands which then would be light, warm, & perhaps, for a flitch of time, feathered.^[1]

Some of my most vivid memories of birds are not my own. They are my wished-for memories.

One is the story about storm petrels coming into their burrows at night, told by Richard Nelson in The Island Within. Nelson weaves his story with the 1896 experiences of Joseph Grinnell on an island Nelson calls Kanaashi in the temperate rainforest of southeast Alaska (or British Columbia? He is wonderfully elusive in his pinpointing).

Near midnight, Nelson writes, “The air is swarming with petrels, like feathers falling in a whirlwind. I can still pick out individual birds against the dimly lit sky, darting back and forth, swift as hunting hawks, delicate as dancing butterflies, agile as looping swallows. If their wings make any noise, it’s lost in the clamor of calls.”

Envy, awe, and an almost sexual ache of longing fill me.

I’ve seen specimens of storm petrels sailors (and others) would use as candles, a wick threaded down into their oily bodies, string lolling like a strange tongue from the open bill. What did it smell like, I wonder?  The stomach oil of those birds, the burning of its own dried flesh?  It seems both beautiful and barbaric. A candle from the body of a bird, a bird just the right size to fit into a fist, its feathers warming the hand that holds it.

I’ve seen the birds he mentions, the island he mentions (or one like it). I’ve walked the shore, peered into the valleys riddled with burrows without seeing a single bird. But I’ve never been there at dusk, flashlight clenched and covered so as not to disturb, my hand hot from the bulb but also with the wish for light, for what the light might call toward me. I’ve never slept in a tent there, birds hitting the rain fly throughout the night, calls coming up from the burrows.

And I’ve never been there alone. Always with a group of people for whom I’m guide. So, in a way, I haven’t been there at all. I haven’t seen them at all.

But wait. Just this week, working on an eco-tour ship in the Aleutians, I was called out of my bunk at midnight by one of the crew. There was a bird trapped in the pool, she said. D and I pulled on boots and jackets, grabbed a towel, and rushed out on deck. It was a Leach’s storm petrel fluttering and stuck beneath the netting tied over the empty swimming pool (in all my time aboard, I’d only seen it filled once). Against the turquoise tiles lit by deck lights, it looked even more delicate than when seen fluttering above the waves. D climbed down a ladder and walked slowly, holding the towel before her, trapping the panicked bird. An ornithologist, she’d worked with petrels in the North Atlantic for many years. She checked the wings (fine and fine) then lifted the bird to me. I reached out my hand, first and second finger wide in a “v” to hold the neck. Its small bill tapped my knuckle. My other fingers curled around its soft, warm body, claw-like, trapping but not gripping. We walked it down to the fantail, the darkest part of the ship, and I set my other palm beneath its sweet, leathery, webbed feet, opened my fingers, and it flew off, tilting over the wake in its typical, butterfly-like flight.

D brought her fingers to her nose. “Smell that?  I love the smell of petrels,” she said. I lifted my hand to my face. Just my own skin-smell. No evidence at all to breathe in. Then D held her hand to my nose. Musty. Soft. A rich, subtle perfume

Muttonbirds, Port Fairy, Australia (January 1, 2016)

Bridge to island over water that could be waded. Island fortified, pathed, prepared for threat by sea. Inland, confusion of succulents overgrowing each other over dune-mounds, green and loose. Baby joggers, track suits, kids on bikes circle the paved perimeter, take the lighthouse spur. Ibis preen. Yellow wattle of masked lapwings bright against purple heather. But what holds attention, imagination is shadow, shadow dug into white sand shadowed by karkalla, the carpet of sound it will become in darkness.

 

silent tunneled dunes

hunched in dark depth, unsleeping

one and one and one

 

Peer in, hopeful. Imagined eye. At one entrance, unfleshed wings, splayed. Adult taken by hawk or rat. Dear unfledged (unhatched?) one, I’ll look for you off the Aleutians in August.[2]

Another unlived story that shines in my memory is one related by a friend. She heard it, in turn, from a friend. It takes place on Penikese Island, a rocky hunch in Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts.

Penikese has a fascinating history. From 1873 to 1875, it was the site of a research institution that would later become Woods Hole Marine Biological Library. Then it was a leper colony—the only one in New England. I can imagine those poor people, islanded, isolated but in view of the mainland. It must have been so cold and damp in the winter. The first doctor to the colony quit, not able to face the solitude. After the colony was disbanded in 1921, the state razed the buildings and left Penikese as a bird sanctuary. Fear of contagion prevented any other use … but the story doesn’t end there.

I have been on Penikese only once, back in the late 1990s, when I took a boat to look for seals as part of an Audubon day trip. It was a cold time of year, most likely early spring. We landed on the island and walked around. Orange-gold lichen splayed across the large stones of the old buildings. Someone gave us a tour of the facility which, since the 1970s, had been used as a rehabilitation school for young men who had broken minor laws.

Penikese is low and rocky. Small. Only seventy-five acres. Yet there are spaces to hide. Swales and nooks and those crumbling, loose-mortared foundations.

Here’s the story my friend told me: in 1972, a boy on the island heard a strange sound in the night. Something different than a mouse, which no doubt he often heard skittering in the dark. I wonder why he was awake. Was it bullying from the other boys?  Fear at the absence of urban sounds?  Just ordinary restlessness?

Some of the story details are fuzzy to me. But at some point he told one of the school teachers. I can’t quite believe that he was lucky enough—that we are lucky enough—the teacher listened to him. Not only listened—was curious, too. The next night, both stayed up alert, attuned.

It turned out that they had discovered Manx shearwaters nesting.

Manx—quick-flapping and stiff-winged, smart black and white plumage. This species wasn’t supposed to be there. They weren’t supposed to be breeding in North America at all. Most of the world’s population still breeds on islands off Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. But there they were, on Penikese, discovered by a kid almost written off, a kid isolated “for his own good” on the kind of refuge island these birds seek.

Prions, New Island, Falkland Islands (December 25, 2011)

White sand hard packed, beach crescent oystercatcher-stippled. Copper-sheathed ship stem sculptural, wrecked gentle. Perfect porcelain commode visible through hull hole, bright and clean and tilted. Useless. Stroll the island’s saddle to bird amphitheater: albatross, rockhopper, shag. Skua working to down a downy chick headfirst, webbed feet flopping. In landing-prep read the fact sheet & am lost still at what is unseen and surrounding and nearly underfoot everywhere—

 

in tunneled tussock

millions of silent prions

hunker until dusk

 

Favorite bird, hard to see even at sea, wave-blue, white-edged, an unreality fleetingly real tilting above our wake beyond sight of land.[3]

I did not grow up a birdwatcher. In my growing-up world there were robins, ducks, seagulls, eagles, crows, and geese. Ducks, to be clear, were mallards. (Did any other kind exist?) Sometimes, we’d toss bread into a pond to see them come to us. This was less about the birds, somehow, and more about the power of being able to dispense bounty or incite a frenzy. The birds were aggressive, rustly and sharp-beaked, poking the sodden crumbs with quick strikes. Standing by the water’s edge with a sweaty clutch of plastic bread bag, I looked down on them, I remember, with a mix of disdain and fear.

Other birds lived in my Pacific Northwest suburban childhood, but in our family we did not notice them. Maybe a hummingbird now and then. Maybe a jay or the hammering of a pileated woodpecker. My grandmother kept birdfeeders on her porch and a pair of binoculars on the kitchen table to watch things flit in and out. This seemed odd to me at the time, an activity of an older and perhaps old-fashioned generation. I remember the binoculars had a tan leather case and a leather strap. They were heavy and black and when I peered through them, I couldn’t get them to focus very well.

So what changed?  How did I become a birder?

Whales were my gateway animal. And how did I get to whales?  From boats. From a love of boats. Just out of college, my literature degree in hand, I signed on for a year as a deckhand on a boat that would travel from Alaska to Baja. There, a few early signs of my path toward true bird-love can be found, moments of attention that were held by birds—tufted puffins pounding their bright orange feet over the surface of the water as they ran toward flight, yellow breeding-plumes trailing behind like bicycle handlebar streamers (but everybody adores puffins, I was not unique in that delight); a spiral of sound that ascended through a glacial valley (Swainson’s thrush), but that was more atmospheric than specific to the bird itself; the slight shock at first noticing red flesh around the yellow eye of a black oystercatcher, so dinosaur-like and intense. These felt like part of a larger ambience of wonder, though, not a goal of attending to birds in and of themselves.

At age twenty-nine, I began working as a naturalist on Cape Cod whale watching boats. The year before I’d been a kayak guide, and had spent my summer on the water, too, but this was different. On the Provincetown whale watches, we’d head out for our three-hour foray, sometimes leaving land far behind. We were in a different world, the world I’d been missing since I worked and lived aboard boats on the West Coast.

At first it was a scramble to just know what to say—the safety stuff, the crew intros, the basics of geography and geology. I wanted to get it right. And when we did find whales, I honestly was agog with looking. Their huge flukes, the way water shifted right before they rose to the surface, the pink of their open maws when they came up. But watching whales involves a lot of time on the water not watching whales; watching the water and waiting for whales. And when the whales were up, there were these noisy fluttering things above them sometimes, too. Often, they’d lead us to feeding whales. I started to pay attention.

“Birds,” the captain would say, and we’d see a loose cloud gathering over the water and steer toward it. And then the dark water lightened, the green glow began, the whale huffed up.

When did “birds” become the focal point rather than the precursor? I am not sure I could really say. Sometime in that first year?  When I learned enough about cetaceans to feel comfortable being loose with my presentation and got curious about the “other stuff”?  Probably.

I remember one season early on. A glossy, glassy day in summer. The air a bit soft and hazy with humidity. Light swell from the east. Hundreds upon hundreds of Wilson’s storm petrels fluttering over the water in their distinctive, wobbly, butterfly-like way. It looked like pepper had spilled on the ocean. Like water-striders on a vast pond. The birds’ thin, foolishly long legs dangled beneath them, as if they were the puppeteers and puppets all at once, jerking themselves up and down above the surface, beaks nipping down for plankton.

Someone told me they had a sense of smell. I hadn’t thought about birds and smell. Someone told me they may well be the most numerous bird on the planet, and yet I’d never seen them until now. What else could I not know?  What else?

A fluttering of storm petrels. The seeming vulnerability of their tiny bodies engenders an upwelling of emotion similar to that evoked when I at last see my sweet niece and nephew, who live across the country from me. Overwhelming, maternal, deeply embodied. Full of closeness and distance at once.

Atlantic Puffins, Lunga Island, United Kingdom (May 25, 2015)

Delicious, delicious, delicious this wild alongside the long-storied shore of Scotland. Ferry guests from ship through the ebbing channel to rough rock notch. Blue towels laid over barnacles & algae as welcome carpet and (hopeful) slip-prevention. Job swap. Hand off my boat and hike loose cobble, scramble thrift-tufted turf-slope to scarp-top, a lush, green ledge. Join the throng, both gore-texed and feathered.

 

busy busy

hop, bow, pluck greens, preen, posture

hushed, tunneled eggs below

 

Hundreds. Thousands. Hatchet-bills and orange feet bright. We sit, stare, and no one crowds them. Amazingly, I don’t have to scold one encroacher. A huge-eyed rabbit works its jaw and I remind myself that it is not introduced, not invasive, but belongs.

Yesterday, June 14, I saw my first Cory’s shearwaters of the 2016 season. They came across the Atlantic Ocean to Cape Cod from Algeria or Portugal or the Azores. These are non-breeding birds. Maybe they failed this year, not able to reunite with a mate who was lost at sea or their egg plundered by raptor or rat. Maybe they’re young and are not yet ready to commit to the annual May egg-laying, incubation, and chick feeding that will occupy so much of their long lives. It used to be rare to see Cory’s shearwaters, but in the last few years there have been so many. I don’t know why.

My gladness in their bright bills, their strong-winged soaring flips toward questions. Are we seeing more because of a greater range in juveniles? Greater instances of nesting failure?  Is this a sign of woe?

Pelagic birds are sentinels, bringing back news gathered over the thousands of miles they travel before returning to land. Their presence is a connection to another place. For me, their presence is also an emotional door to other connections. In the deep watching of creatures, I drift through thoughts of friends (J’s sick father, the awkward conversation with M), family (What would my grandmother think of the light this afternoon, this gannet’s dramatic plunge? How I wish I could show her), politics (Can the Dutch really invent a technique to deal with the ocean’s plastic gyres?), snippets of song, facts about the birds’ life histories. It all becomes loose, blurred and blended by the immediacy of a bill or the cacophony of overlayered calls. Attending birds at sea is at once a respite from the scatter of land-based obligations (no cell signal, no other errands) and also a time when my mind can move as they do—soar, dip, sheer, glide.

But what is it about these land-avoiders that so deeply moves me? What is it that gets me about these birds who would spend their lives at sea if only they could find a place to put an egg on the waves? We resonate with certain animals, I believe, because they are a physical embodiment of an answer we are seeking. A sense of ourselves in the world that is nearly inexpressible.

Does it have to do with my need to be a secret poet among biologists, a secret naturalist among poets? These birds are secret land-dwellers at sea, sea-goers on land. It’s true that I feed on the dynamic swing between aspects of my life. I need the community shearwaters have in nesting, the solitude they have in ranging. I need the time working on boats as part of a crew, the time alone in a chair adrift with words.

Pelagic birds have long incubation times and do not easily recover when one egg is lost. I am slow. I am slow to decide, to determine, to recover from hurt.

Or does it have to do with my own queerness and sense of how that has shaped me in the world?  The lives of egg-burying, colonial birds like petrels are such a clear expression that dangers lurk, that community is key to survival, that expressions of gender can be hard to read for outsiders. The way they develop in darkness and emerge to light, born in a space that is not suited for a full life and then (hopefully) emerging to the realm in which they can soar…

The life of these birds is so different, so beautifully other. I suppose you could say the same for anyone’s loved species, but these are mine. And so I connect my loves to my love of them.

Footnotes:

[1] Sea birds like petrels, shearwaters, and prions are drawn to lights much as moths are. Ships are a beacon to them, and they can become stunned or trapped on deck. In breeding areas, ships are required to shutter their windows at night to prevent such incidents.

[2] Karkalla is the local name of the ice plant, or Carpobrotus rossii.

[3] The Protector III, a sealing vessel, beached on New Island in 1969. The thin-billed prion (Pachyptila belcheri) nests on New Island, digging ~3m burrows into the hillsides. Nocturnal nesters, the adults leave the chicks in the burrows during the day while they forage at sea. New Island is most likely the most important breeding spot for these birds, representing 30% of the world population.

***

Reprinted with permission of the author

Bradfield had this to say about “Buried Birds”:

“Buried Birds” comes from both assignment and long obsession. Writer/editor Susan Fox Rogers asked me if I had any essays about birds for an anthology she was editing. I didn’t, but the query prompted me to think about the origins of my love for birds and how it ties into the other loves of my life. After all, no part of us is isolated. Our social selves, histories, and obsessions/fears/hopes all influence how we understand the world around us.

Elizabeth Bradfield’s most recent book is Toward Antarctica (Boreal/Red Hen Press 2020). Based on Cape Cod, she works as a naturalist and educator on ships and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University. Find her at ebradfield.com; Instagram: e.bradfield; Twitter: @ecbradfield.

Photo credit: Cotton Coulson