Among Hawks and Hummers

On Ontario's Sibley Peninsula, August was not too early for warblers and nuthatches, swallows and hawks to begin moving toward their winter ranges. They gathered at the southern tip, resting, feeding, waiting for clear skies and a fair wind. In a rocky clearing between Lake Superior and the forest, two rustic cabins housed the Thunder Cape Bird Observatory where I would work for the month. A college prof in my mid-fifties, I was anxious about doing well outside of a classroom.Birds have been important to me ever since the first great blue heron of my life levered itself up from a riverbed and lofted over my head, its wingspan greater than my height. Every spring, warblers have been bright postcards from warmer climates. I've fed chickadees perched on my hand—they apparently view a resting hiker as a supply wagon. Otherwise, birds have always been up there, out there, unreachable. At Thunder Cape I would stroke them and discover the astonishing density and depth of their feathers, the tininess of the bodies beneath.The staff was small. John, the only professional, quiet, always the teacher, talked about birds rather than himself. His wife, Mo, called herself Dragon Lady and told stories about a rowdy past. She outdid John in all dimensions—taller, broader, louder, brasher.Dean, slim and dignified, had arrived the day before me. He sported blond Rastafarian locks. In September he'd be a college senior. Jennifer, another volunteer, joined us mid-month. She looked to be in her thirties, tall and aloof, and came straight from a month or two at Long Point, a much larger observatory on Lake Erie. She carried a well-worn field guide and knew her birds cold, much better than I did.For six hours a day, from a platform above the beach, we stood watch, scanning lake and sky with binoculars, recording all birds seen and marking as migrants those headed south toward the nearest land, Michigan's Isle Royale. Every half hour two of us followed looped trails that led to clearings hung with mist nets, so fine they were nearly invisible. They caught songbirds; coarser nets occasionally snagged hawks. For the first week Mo taught me extraction techniques and John taught Dean. He learned faster, and I felt the big woman beside me twitch with impatience.The first bird I cleared solo was a Canada warbler. I held it up like a trophy and grinned at it. Dragonflies zoomed around us as if in celebration. I put it head-down in a soft cotton bag made by a Thunder Bay sewing club and tightened the drawstring. The bag calmed the bird the way a blindfold does a frightened horse. On the best days I had two or three bags hanging from my arm as I went on to the next net. It felt better than doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. In ink. In the tiny lab, John processed the birds—banded, aged, sexed, measured and weighed them, quickly, gently, while Dean and I took turns logging data. For weighing, John slipped the redstarts and thrushes on their heads into a toilet-paper tube with the bottom blocked with cardboard. Lifting them off the scale, he up-ended the tube over a clear plastic chute in the window, open to the outdoors. If the bird didn't emerge on its own, he tapped the tube and it slid out, shook its feathers into place and blurred away.“Down the tubes,” we'd say, flicking the cardboard that held a hesitant chickadee. “Sayonara” to the myrtle warbler that flew for all it was worth. To the many resident song sparrows, some of which we caught two or three times a day, we said, “Don't come back!”John watched Dean and me closely as we weighed, measured, and banded our first birds. Again, Dean learned faster. Sometimes my face was hot with embarrassment at how long the lab work took me. Jen, of course, needed no training and was almost as fast as John.Once or twice we found a hummingbird in a net. In John's hands it looked like an iridescent flower. He let them go as soon as he'd freed them: They were too fragile to band. Mo told us we'd make mistakes in the log. “White-out is your friend.” Other kinds of mistakes were more serious. A song sparrow sprang into the air from Dean's hands, flaring against lab windows above our reach, banging against the glass. Jen climbed onto the workbench and cupped the frantic creature in her hands.Some misfortunes were beyond our control. Dean and I found a mangled warbler in a net, feathers wet with blood.We called John, who extracted it without his usual finesse and tossed it into the bushes. He said it had been crushed by a deer. “They like the moisture,” he said, and told us to raise that net higher so the deer wouldn't notice caught birds.“Moisture?” I asked, after John left. Bird blood runs as red as ours. “Carnivorous deer?”Dean smiled his small smile. “Bambi the vampire.” Late in the month we caught sharp-shinned hawks, which slammed into our nets while streaking through the forest in pursuit of smaller birds. Usually snagged by the feet, they struggled mightily and sometimes got away. Strong, feisty creatures. First-years had heavily striped breasts and yellow eyes that would change to red by the next spring. Too large for our post-processing chute, hawks had to be released outside the lab.Why was it I felt an emotional tug when they flew? I tossed them up and they sank and then opened their wings and caught the air. Slow, powerful strokes, and the broad backs moved away sedately, at eye level. Weight lifted from my hands, from my whole body. As a child I flew in my dreams; was it not still possible? For a moment I believed so. One morning toward the end of the month, John and Mo went off in the launch to visit friends. Dean and I took it as a compliment, a vote of confidence in our new extracting and banding skills. We and Jen took turns, one of us taking the watch on the beach platform while the other two checked nets.I was on the platform when Dean bounded from the woods. “Do we have any scissors? Jen's got a sharpie in a tangle.” The mist nets were fine enough to be broken with our fingers, but hawk nets were tougher.“I have a jackknife,” I said. “Can you take the watch?”At the net, Jen looked uncharacteristically rattled. The sharpie was a mess. He'd got one wing involved and his feet were crossed in a bundle of mesh. He looked alert, eyes fierce. For some reason I took that yellow gaze as a challenge and put my jackknife back in my pocket.“Let me try,” I said to Jen. “You're burned out.”Feet first. I got one free, and the hawk immediately stuck it back into the net. “No, you don't,” I told him. I pulled it out again and started on the other. It took longer, but I felt calm. I had to free him; there was nobody else right there, right then. Who knew when John and Mo would be back? Maybe not until sundown. Maybe not until the next day.I concentrated, one strand at a time. The second foot was free. I breathed a sigh of relief. The wing would be easier.The wing wasn't easier. I stopped and looked at the sky, then back at the hawk. Imagined him as a scaled-up warbler. As I slid the last strand off, Dean pounded up with a pair of scissors.I held the hawk like an oversized ice-cream cone, my hand around his lower body with the legs pressed against it. I was so relieved I laughed. The hawk's head swiveled toward the sound, and I met his alien eyes. He tested my hold with a powerful wing-stroke that lifted my arm. So different from a songbird! The protocol for carrying hawks to the lab was different, too—we slid them into Pringle's potato-chip cans with holes in the bottom for air.I hesitated. He'd been in the net longer than I liked. “Should we just let him go?”The three of us assessed him. He looked fine—not droopy or trembling. So I Pringled him, which confirmed my guess at his gender: the larger female sharpies’ tails protruded from the tube by an inch or two, but this hawk slid neatly in until his tail disappeared.In the lab, Jen was angry. “They shouldn't have left us alone,” she said. “It's irresponsible.”“Right.” But I was glad, because freeing that hawk was a boost I badly needed. I'd been able to get him out when Jen and Dean couldn't. Finally, I'd done something right. A turning, like a shift from minor to major chord. My anxiety melted. I found myself held in an invisible net of bird flights, the air changed where they had flown, would fly. Other strands were made of song, pulses of sound that lifted me, a kind of talk that included me even though I couldn't speak its language. The trees listened too, and ferns vibrated. Among the community of species, I was one. Mo and I were clearing the table. She turned to me. “You closed the nets?” We volunteers had put them up for a few extra hours that afternoon.“Yes.” The disappointments of the afternoon prickled up. I'd had to close all the nets by myself, and had gotten skunked in the bargain—not even a recidivist song sparrow to bag. Dean and Jen had agreed to share the work, but he'd disappeared and she was snoring in her bunk.Never mind, I told myself. In a few minutes we'd all settle in for the nightly Scrabble game. Sporadic talk would bring us closer. We weren't friends—we'd probably never see each other once we left this place—but we were bound by the wilderness and our work in it and the importance of those things to us.Only one more day to go. Mo made cocoa and we settled around the kitchen table. It was a cool night, windy; in the dark bay beyond the window, the red light on the navigation buoy rose and fell. The forces of my ordinary life welled up around the little cabin, ready to reassert themselves. My legs swung out of the bunk and I was putting on my boots in the dark before I knew what I was doing, as if my body had gotten a command my mind hadn't heard about yet. I dressed quickly, found my headlamp by feel, and crept through the cabin like a cat burglar. The kitchen clock said five minutes past four. I closed the door silently.Cold outside. Now I knew where my body was going, and why. I argued back at it, trying to ease the clutch in my chest: I closed that net. I closed all the nets. I remembered doing it, the poles in my hands, the cloth strips. I pulled the nets down. I tied them.The tightness inside me didn't go away. My body was taking me to the farthest net. Normally I would have gone past John and Mo's cabin, but I took the long way around and kept my light off, finding my way by starlight.I closed them all.I reached the net. The rolled mesh hung low, its orange ties bright when I switched on my headlamp.Before I could relax, I saw farther on another net, hanging open. This was the double, the only double net in the whole study site. I'd been working with it for a month. How could I not have remembered?Moving forward, I pulled off my headlamp and flashed its beam over the second net, hoping, for the first time, to see it empty. Left untended since just before dinnertime. A bird caught for hours? Unthinkable.No birds. I took a breath.Two more steps, three. I saw something. It was so small it couldn't be a bird. It must be a leaf.It wasn't a leaf. I stopped in front of the tiny thing and felt blood pound in my ears.A hummingbird. It wasn't moving. I felt like flinging myself on the ground. Howling.I put the headlamp back on. Breathed deeply in and out, and focused on the bird. It was badly tangled. I looked at its feet, its wings. How could it be so tiny? I broke one net strand, then another.Stood with the hummingbird in my hand, the night deathly quiet around us. Then a breeze sprang up, and the lake sighed.I was numb. Poleaxed with shame.A thrush called somewhere in the dark forest. It would be light soon. For a moment I thought about burying the bird. No. I needed to pull the net down, tie it and leave. Later, John or Mo would wonder about the broken strands. Maybe they would ask what had happened. Whether they asked or not, I would tell them.Sick, I looked at the bird again, its iridescent feathers shimmering in my headlamp beam. I tossed it toward some bushes where it would fall out of sight. I watched to make sure it did—the thought of John discovering a dead hummer was mortifying.The arc of its fall reversed and it flew away.I stood, fighting disbelief. Finally understanding: The warmth of my hands had revived it. I rolled up the net and stumbled back to the cabin. With any luck the hummer had been there only a few minutes. I talked myself into believing this. If it had been hanging there all night it surely would have died. So it must have been active very early.By the light of day I knew I couldn't face Mo's wrath, John's disgust. So I said nothing, did my work. If Dean or Jen noticed I didn't join their conversations while we stood the watch, they would think it was because of the sadness of leaving the next day. And it was that, too. But now I carried another burden. I'd been tested, and I'd failed. Early in the month a couple of backpackers had asked John if they could camp overnight in the room at the top of a 50-meter tower in the forest behind the cabins. Great idea. I'd meant to sleep up there myself. I did so at my last night on the peninsula, perhaps in symbolic recognition of my new distance from the good-hearted, trustworthy people in the cabins below.Carrying my sleeping bag and a thermos of coffee, I climbed above the dark woods. Up there, the sun was just setting. Large windows showed me a cloud factory: Wind coming over the lake was forced to rise up a rocky cliff, becoming visible as the water condensed out at the top. The cliff looked as if it were steaming toward the lake, trailing a thin cloud.The night sky treated me kindly. Northern Lights pulsed and shivered, shadowy white sheets hung out to dry. Knees against my chest, I stared at them. How should I regard something so lovely? What was my relationship, now, to the Lights, to the warblers and thrushes I'd handled, to the owl I heard among the moon-shadows below me? To the porcupine I'd seen beside the path, standing, a nursing kit at her quill-free, black belly? What could I say to the coming dawn? My failure mystified me. Not closing that net could have meant a dead hummingbird. Or more than one. How could I have overlooked an open net?I tried out excuses. It was dusk, and the mist nets were so fine even birds didn't see them.But I was not a bird. And I'd known the net was there. There was something wrong with me.No, I'd made a mistake—as Mo had predicted we all would.The full moon rose and washed out the Lights, dimmed the stars. Yet the Big Dipper still hung in one window and Cassiopeia in the other. My mind drifted slowly with them. Constellations were a museum of stories, millennia of tales about failure and recovery, shame and resilience.I lay in my sleeping bag and gathered the best moments of the month—the thrill of freeing my first bird, the satisfaction of extricating the sharp-shinned hawk. How I'd felt connected to the peninsula, to the birds I'd held and those I hadn't, how I'd been held in turn by all their songs, by the hosts of leaves they inhabited, by the forest and its understory.That morning, Dean, master of simplicity, had said, “I'm glad I got up today.”I kept my own kind of watch, and then I slept.