I place her back in the nest and edge away, taking the cage with me. Her beak is red like she’s dipped it in blood. And just as I am about to let her go she turns very still so that I can feel her heartbeat pounding inside my palm. The plastic tightens firmly on her leg, keeping the tracker in place. I start to tremble but keep going, it’s too late now, you have touched her, branded her, pressed your human self upon her. “I’m sorry, we’re nearly there, nearly there.” She makes a sound I know too well, one I make in my dreams most nights. But I’ve been practicing and so I am, my fingers swiftly looping the band over her leg, shifting it over the joint to the upper stretch beneath her feathers.
She flaps only once, a sudden burst of defiance before my cold hand closes over her body and ceases her wings’ movement. I stop breathing as my hand moves to lift the basket. She doesn’t need it anymore-her fledglings are already diving for their own food-but she returns to it like all mothers unable to let go. The nest she has built with her mate is rudimentary, a scattering of grass and twigs wedged into a crevice in the rocks. My boots crunch and I see a ruffle of her feathers, that hesitant first flap, the will-I-try-to-break-free moment. There are others of her kind all over the icy rocks and circling the air, but they’re quick to avoid me. Wind screams, biting at my cheeks and nose. I approach slowly, reluctant to scare her. The world around her has changed just a little, or a lot. But she knows somehow that she is no longer free. Her wing clips the hair-thin wire and the basket closes gently over her. It’s only luck that I’m watching when it happens. Once, it was birds who gave birth to a fiercer me. Or maybe I was just hoping the bird’s final migration would show me a place to belong. Maybe I thought I’d discover whatever cruel thing drove me to leave people and places and everything, always. Maybe I was hoping it would lead me to where they’d all fled, all those of its kind, all the creatures we thought we’d killed. Once, when the animals were going, really and truly and not just in warnings of dark futures but now, right now, in mass extinctions we could see and feel, I decided to follow a bird over an ocean.
We stayed a time with them, and for those few dark hours we were able to pretend we were the same, as wild and free. I knew only that they were fierce in their night caves and bold as they dove through moonlit waters. The night he took me there, I didn’t know they were some of the last of their kind. Once, my husband found a colony of storm petrels on the rocky coast of the untamed Atlantic.
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