I’ve been visiting the houses of my past in my dreams again lately. It has me thinking about what it means to feels like you belong and what feels it like accept that in some places, you never belonged. And this piece reminded me that it’s okay to shed houses like skin.

I often dream of houses. My houses are amalgamations of places I have lived but often with the addition of ominous courtyards and corridors begging to be explored or promising to be haunted. Left alone to tend to memories and shuttered traumas, the Craftsmans, Victorians, tract homes, and apartments warp and wend. They are as familiar as they are alien in my dreams and rarely welcoming. Yet, I visit them often looking for things lost, departed animal companions, and people no longer in this world.

Despite my occasional check-ins, I neglect these places past and have almost always forgotten to pay their rent for years. I worry about how I’m going to cover all that is past due and still pay my current mortgage. I can’t remember why I never broke the lease or why I left so much behind. I wake up from these dreams with a spike of panic, thinking of all that I am about to lose.

I’ve never been sure why my subconscious chooses the architecture of lived places as the framework for its tasks. Perhaps it’s that there have been so many over the years and they make a great selection for dreamscapes. A house, after all, is just a shell and doesn’t necessarily reflect who we are or what we might become. It just protects us from the elements and gives us a place to put our things. And I seem to like keeping a lot of things in my dreamscape houses. In fact, I’ve been doing inventory in my sleep for the past month.

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There were a few things left in early childhood bedroom at my Dad’s house and I took my animal encyclopedias and some toy blocks. There was nothing left in the bedroom at my grandparents’ house where I spent the rest of my childhood and I couldn’t find any socks or shoes that matched at my mom’s house.

The apartment from early 20’s was a different story. It was packed with possessions. Drawers were filled with odds and ends I had bought in duplicate and didn’t know why. My closets were overflowing and with so many cute dresses and tops but none of them fit. I trailed my fingers across the fabrics, admiring them but accepted that I would never wear them again.

There were knickknacks on every tabletop and shelf. They were beautiful and I examined each one, but I could see no use for them. However, in a tiny drawer, I unburied an emerald pendant on a silver chain that according to the dream I had lost many years before. I took that with me. I also took two guitars, an illustrated book of birds, and a couple of limited printing, special edition books.

I woke up after this dream with the sense that I had completed some huge task. In fairness, I had, at least metaphorically, rummaged through half a lifetime, carefully considered what to take and decidedly left everything else behind.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I took with me and about shedding all these houses like a skin. These were the houses of the Maiden and the Mother and I am no longer either. My shell should now be home to the Autumn Queen, the Maga, so that she can do the work required to become the Crone. I imagine these stages like instars, the stages of development in a nymph or a caterpillar. Patterns, colors and proportions change with each instar, often in spectacular ways. Yet, to get to the next instar and become something new, they have to molt. Arthropods must slough off their exoskeleton before they can assume a new form.

A body is just a house for all the amazing and seemingly impossible magic that kicks around inside of each of us. Our bodies change. We age and we can’t really shed our outer covering (at least not yet) but I think we can still molt and that we become something more than we were when we do. I think the hard work of becoming hinges on this molt. The work is in what we choose to keep and what we leave behind when we let go of our houses. I hope I chose well.

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My house in Banning has three Aleppo pines in the side yard that are undoubtedly as old as the 1925 house. Well-loved by local birds, the acorn woodpeckers have drilled cavities for nesting and created granaries for the coast live oak acorns they gather from the backyard. The first two years I lived in this house, one of those abandoned cavities was home to a pair of American kestrels.

I delighted in them as well as the pair of red-tailed hawks across the street. At least, I did until all their babies fledged at once the second spring. The red-tailed parents let loose territorial screams as the parent kestrels shouted obscenities in falcon and dive-bombed their heads. The three fledgling hawks begged, yelling at increasing volumes at their distracted parents, flinching while the kestrels pounded on them as well. All the while, the three fledgling falcons’ shrill demands for food added a piercing rhythm to the din. And suddenly none of them were charming. I hid inside with the stereo turned up, waiting for the ruckus to resolve itself.

American kestrels, North America’s smallest falcon and arguably most beautiful raptor, aren’t considered endangered but their population has been declining since the mid-60s. A February 2026 paper published in Ecosphere analyzed available data across the continent and detected a decline of approximately 1%-2% per year from 1986 to 2019. Overall, this suggests a 29% population decline and they continue to decline. Twenty years ago, however, in my noisy yard, they seemed a little too common.

The fledgling kestrels, two females and a male, were rowdy and restless. As they started to peer further out of their pine cavity and jockey for the best position, the bigger sisters eventually pushed their brother out. I found him running in my side yard, his wings almost ready but not tested.

I sighed, thinking of the feral neighborhood cats. Then I ran him down, scooped him up despite his protests, and admired him. He was probably 100 grams, fit in the palm of my hand, and was pure spitfire. I thought about keeping him and putting him on my falconry license, but it was a fleeting thought once his parents noticed what I was up to. The chorus of killy killy killy pierced straight through my skull and torpedoed that fancy instantly.

So, I got a ladder and popped him onto the highest branch I could reach, warning him to steer clear of his brutish sisters until he figured out his wings. He found his way back to safety and the whole family made it through the spring with flying colors of blue, rust, and beige. Sometimes I think about him and wished I had made a different decision, but only because I never had kestrels in my yard again.

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No one can point a finger at a single reason for the kestrel’s decline, but the 2026 study supported previously proposed factors including disappearing arthropods, second-generation rodenticides, neonicotinoid insecticides, and predation. Fewer grasshoppers and dragonflies, poisoned mice, and sterile fields are probably only part of the perfect storm. I watched another challenge play out in my front yard and despite appearances, it wasn’t the neighboring hawks.

Another major challenge to kestrels is competition for nesting sites. The next year, invasive European starlings arrived and took over the nest cavity. There were more of them, and they were bigger and aggressive. The kestrels had to find someplace else to raise a family. It may not be one of the primary drivers for the little falcons’ decline, but it is certainly one of many reasons we see fewer and fewer of them. I wish I had known that the little male kestrel hatched in my yard, held in my steady and admiring hands, was a once in a lifetime moment in the shifting phenology of my yard.

The primary hands-on conservation effort to help with limited nest sites has been nest box programs across the country. Fortunately, kestrels readily take to appropriately crafted and placed human-made cavities and have even shown site fidelity to areas where they are successful. It’s a wonderful start, and if you want to help, supporting your local nest box program is a meaningful way to do it. But it’s just that, a start.

I know I did the right thing two decades ago when I put that little male kestrel back in the boughs, but I think about him and his family every spring. I wish I had paused to truly enjoy the cacophony of a richly successful spring. I wish I could have held space for them in my yard.

I think though, that these moments of small loss that haunt us are just as important as the conservation successes. They are the moments we long for and the stories we tell. And maybe, just maybe, they are enough to inspire another generation to keep fighting.

Written Bird is a reader-supported publication. I have turned paid subscriptions back on after an 8 month hiatus. If you were previously a paid subscriber, your subscription was ended so there would be no billing surprises for anyone. You are very welcome to re-subscribe if you are enjoying the essays!

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Lark sparrows are my favorite American sparrow species. There are 48 or so species of sparrow in the United States and for the most part their markings are reliably cryptic. There is a reason you get to call them, “little brown jobs” when you first begin birding. They have a diverse mixture of similar markings in sepia and grayscale, but at a glance, what you see is brown. Unless you are looking at a lark sparrow.

Sure, lark sparrows are also brown, but with chestnut harlequin face markings and white tail spots that rebel against the norms of its tribe. They arrive dressed for attention and they always get mine. There is a disrespect for danger in the lark sparrow’s demand to be seen. And I know I’m not the only one who finds that irresistible.

People love a harlequin. They have since the trickster first appeared in the 16^th-century Italian Commedia dell’arte, demanding attention with slapstick comedy. It wasn’t enough for a harlequin to walk across the stage. He had to punctuate an action with cartwheel, bring attention to a prank with a departing somersault. When physical comedy wasn’t enough to hold our attention, he spoke truth to royalty through mockery and misdirection. The more dangerous it was for the harlequin to draw attention, the more closely we watched. And as the harlequin evolved through the centuries, he never lost our attention.

I learned a few years ago through the decoding of DNA that my great-grandfather was not Thomas O’Connor, but in fact a vaudeville actor. I am almost certain that my grandfather, Howard, knew that Thomas was not his father and that we were not O’Connors. He hadn’t even been listed in Thomas’ obituary as next of kin along with his half siblings. It must have been something he knew if only from whispers and glances.

I do not think he knew, however, that his father and his uncle were a long-running vaudevillian comedy tumbling act. Because if Howdy, who raised me, had known that we were harlequins by blood, he would have spun me stories worthy of my imagination. He would have nodded his head in understanding when I was pulled to the stage, the lead in the high school musical. He would have understood why I ran away to do the bird show at Disney’s Animal Kingdom the year after he passed away. He would have warned me that it was dangerous to draw an audience’s attention but would have shrugged when I chased it anyway.

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My great-grandmother, Zelda Pearl, was 14 years old when De Los Sylmar Aspril and his brother James performed in Western Pennsylvania in 1911 as the Astella Brothers. Nine months later my grandfather was born, but Zelda didn’t marry Thomas until she was 17 and my grandfather was 19 months old. When Thomas died in 1920, my grandfather’s four O’Connor siblings were listed as next of kin. Howard was not.

He was something else, the product of a teenager and a brief encounter with a young showman. I’m not sure which of the brothers is my great-grandfather. The DNA available to link us is through the Aspril brothers’ sister, but it is close family DNA and it is mine. In 1926, the brothers were reviewed as a hit and lauded for their “high-order work,” acrobats praised for the risks they took. It is dangerous to be a harlequin, and it is grand. I wish my grandfather could have shared this secret. There is so much to say and unravel and revel in. There is so much sense to be made from my love of harlequins.

It doesn’t seem like a good survival strategy to stand out in a field of sparrows with a harlequin face. I bet my grandfather knew this in his soul, even if he was never told the truth of it. The Italian commedia dell’arte troupes were banished from France in 1697. Their distracting costumes and acrobatics eventually weren’t enough cover for satirizing the Queen for her piety and moral reformism. You cannot perform for your chosen audience and not also be on display to the hawks. I bet my grandfather learned to hide his face. Maybe it’s why he lied about age, leaving home to join the Army at 17 years old.

Eventually, King Louis XIV died, and the harlequin returned to France in 1716. So, I guess you can hope to escape and outlive any predators you provoke. And if you do, then you can always return to the stage.

It’s a strategy that seems to have worked for the lark sparrow. Both male and female are identical in flashy plumage. The sole member of the genus Chondestes with no close relatives, there are no other American sparrows with similar face markings. They also stand out for their unusually long rounded tail with prominent white corners that flash in flight. So, the grasslands harlequin must have a niche that serves them well enough to risk drawing attention to themselves.

I wonder if my grandfather would encourage me to embrace my lineage. I wonder if he would tell me to keep it close and secret. I only knew Zelda Pearl as great-grandma Hullihen, who had taken the name of her second husband. I knew her from the somber Mother’s days when my grandfather and grandmother would take me with them to lay flowers on her grave. But I wonder what Zelda would tell me if she could. Maybe Zelda was a harlequin too, but she learned to hide from the hawks. Maybe she had no choice.

Other sparrow species are just as intricately marked and as beautiful as a lark sparrow if you give them your attention. It just takes more time to pause and to admire them. I know this because I photograph and draw them when I find them. And I find them spectacularly beautiful, but it is the lark sparrow that makes my heart jump in my chest, the sparrow that feels like kin. An eye-catching bird with a mask and secrets. A great-grandmother with the same. Sometimes that is all you get to know for sure, but sometimes it is enough to discover who you are.

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This particular piece feels like a hug from 2023 me, who somehow knew I would need to read this again. And if you needed it as well, I hope these words find you.

This week, as I was walking out to get the mail a flash of orange caught my eye on the ground. I walked over to inspect it and when I realized what it was, I sighed. One of the late autumn monarch butterflies had emerged from its chrysalis and didn’t dry its wings correctly. The tip of its right wing was crumpled, and it couldn’t fly.

There are a few reasons this happens. One is that monarch caterpillars can become infected with Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE), a parasite that steals nutrients and takes up space in the chrysalis. OE has become a larger problem for the diminishing populations of the monarch only in recent years. Loss of native milkweed habitat combined with the introduction of tropical milkweeds are thought to be exacerbating the problem. Native milkweeds die back in the winter, taking OE with them. Tropical milkweed does not die back and becomes an OE farm.

This butterfly, though, looked to me as if it had not pumped out its wings correctly. It had likely chosen a poor spot for its transformation into a chrysalis and hadn’t been able to fully hang upside down when it eclosed. From what I’ve seen, it only takes 15 or 20 minutes for them to fully pump out their wings. Within an hour or two their wings are hardened enough for flight. Any hinderance to this sequence can result in a crumpled wing.

When we talk about caterpillars transforming into butterflies it is usually in metaphors and exclamations of beauty. We speak of it as instant magic, but a chrysalis holds a long brewing potion. I never realized until recently that we choose to ignore this time in between. You are a caterpillar. You bundle up and take a nap. You wake up a butterfly.  Except that transformation is gruesome, long, and fraught with danger.

This was the first year I planted native milkweed in my yard and watching the monarch’s cycle was more shocking than I imagined. When the fat caterpillars have found a place to secure themselves to become a chrysalis, their skin turns vaguely green. If you happen to be watching at the peak of their greening, you can observe them spilt their skin down the center and shrug it off… along with their head.

I raised silkworms in elementary school. I am familiar with cocoons spun with silk. For some reason I always imagined that caterpillars that turned into chrysalises just, well, slowly turned into one. I wasn’t expecting something from the skin-walker playbook. And it didn’t just strip off its skin suit to become another animal. It turned it into goo.

Okay, maybe it’s not all goo, but a lot of it turned into goo. I know because I accidentally knocked a freshly skin-shrugged chrysalis a short distance to the ground and it oozed. I felt terrible, but I also was in awe. Nothing I imagined in the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly was quite correct. When we talk about transformation, why don’t we talk about it like it really is?

We all go through periods of great transformation in our lives whether it’s from youth to puberty, fertile to menopausal, or shrugging off our current life to become something new. Right now, I think many of my friends are transforming into someone ready to face the changes and difficulties of an unsteady world. Some of them are about to change into someone who could help save the world. So many of us are feeling an itch under our skins to become something new. Yet, we don’t acknowledge the difficulties and the needs of this change. Or at least, I haven’t.

Caring for yourself while your mind and body shifts and you remain in stasis is hard. I want to transform now. I want to be what I am going to become posthaste and want to ignore that my mind is foggy, and my body is tired. I don’t want to make time for myself.  Yet, if I push past my body’s quiet request for more rest and more peace, I might make myself sick and never transform. If I rush it, I may not choose the right place to unfurl my wings. I want wings that are full and hardened. I want the strength and sharpness to follow the migratory map that will appear in my head.  And the world needs more monarch butterflies whether they are metaphorical and literal.

The migratory monarch is slated to be listed under the Federal Endangered Species Act potentially in late 2026 and is already protected in California. So, a permit is required in California to handle wild monarchs and it precludes captive rearing. I didn’t realize this, and I don’t think others do either. It’s a recent change and I understand, but it makes me sad that school children won’t be raising monarch caterpillars in California. We should all learn what true transformation looks like along with its struggles and failures.

The bottom-line is that no one goes to bed one night and wakes up a butterfly in the morning. (Although there was that one guy that woke up as cockroach but that story didn’t end well.) So, I’m going to embrace the long transformation and try to be kinder to myself and more patient. I hope you will do the same for yourself.  

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For decades I had three parrots, a red-bellied, Senegal and an African grey parrots. Thirty years is a long time for the little poicephalus parrots and eventually Bali and Loki left us for the sky and it was just Ty, my African grey and me.

There’s been a few rescue parrots in between but, I’ve been a one parrot household for 3 years. Mostly I’m in a place where the parrots are going to outlive me and I know I shouldn’t take in another large parrot, but a budgerigar could fill a big space and maybe 15 years. So, when one of my best friends offered me a budgie she had bred and raised said “yes.” I thought Ty would enjoy the company and I would enjoy a new friend.

We called them parakeets instead of using their Australian name when I was little and everyone had parakeets. They were in my classrooms in elementary school and the sound of every pet store. The grandparents who raised me had two, but one day my grandfather told me to take their cage outside and clean it. I took them outside more out of glee than obedience, lifted the top of their cage to reach the newspaper at the bottom and promptly set them free. This happens when you let a seven-year-old clean a birdcage without careful instructions, but I was bereft. I still remember exactly how I felt watching them fly off into the tangelo tree. My grandfather, however, thought it was hysterically funny.

We never replaced them and it occurs to me that I spent the rest of my life learning how to train birds to come back to me. Budgies may very well have been the beginning of a life chasing birds.

I named the budgie BMO after the character in Adventure Time and was utterly delighted by him. This was in October and the weather was lovely. So, BMO and I spent time together on my screened in porch. My bestie hand-raised him, so while I let him fly free and tried to write, he spent most of his time tangled in my hair or perching on my writing pen. And I was delighted. He sounded like the best moments of my childhood and when he was let out of the cage, he flew straight to me. I had two fabulous weeks with him.

I’m not sure what happened. I took him out on the porch and almost immediately noticed that he didn’t look right. He was too fluffy and eyes squinted like he wasn’t feeling well. And then he began regurgitating. My friend talked me through his symptoms, eliminating every possible cause. (No plants near the cage, food was recently eaten in the bowl, poop in the cage looked good. No toys that were chewed on and might be toxic) Then we dismissed every diagnosis we could come up with, moved on to triage, and then to my sad admission that whatever happened was too late to fix. It happened fast. I knew I was saying goodbye and there wasn’t enough time for an emergency veterinarian to try to help. I am intimately familiar with “too late.” So, mostly I just sat with BMO.

I had to walk myself through how the person who wrote two of the most popular parrot training books, A Parrot for Life, and The Perfectly Trained Parrot couldn’t keep a budgie alive. I had to deal with the fact that my strategic brain investigated every possibility for BMO’s demise and could not find one. I had to come to terms with the fact that one of my best friends in the world raised and loved this tiny fluff and he died on my watch, leaving us grieving and confounded together.

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As a falconer, sometimes I forget that falconry at its core is the heartbeat of nature and nature is life, not just in the field, but also day-to-day. Falconry is full of loss because nature doesn’t hand out passes for raptors you make the deepest bond with or love. Nature takes life when it is time and is cryptic about its deadlines. You learn to be present and not count on tomorrow. You learn to love fiercely in the face of inevitable loss for as long as you are brave enough to believe the joy is worth the pain.

Yet, BMO was just one blow in a series of blows that kept coming. I had lost a friend unexpectedly a few weeks before I lost my budgie. And a few weeks after, I lost another friend. I was struggling and in a spiral of blaming myself for not being strong enough to rise above. So, I let myself slide below and kept sliding. It didn’t feel like I would ever claw my way back up, but the first thing I did when I started to feel the sun on my face again was tell my friend that I was ready to try again.

You can’t replace one pet with another to alleviate pain. It doesn’t work that way. You can start over though. You can be brave enough to not know why you lost love and joy, and therefore the reality that you may lose it again but open yourself to it anyway.

What I had learned though was that sound of budgies soothed my anxiety and coaxed out the kind of laughter that belonged to the little girl that still lives inside of me. It seems ridiculous that budgies are a piece of my journey through sobriety and a tool for managing my mental well-being, but then, budgies are ridiculous in the very best way.

And sometimes, maybe, you have to be brave enough to be ridiculous. My new budgies, Beavis and Butthead, two brothers from the same clutch, are well, ridiculous. And they are the best thing that has happened to me this spring.

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The meadowlarks have returned. I was thinking about this essay and how much I love the sweet song and cheery yellows when I took the reference photos that became the new pieces of art accompanying this piece. I think everyone loves their song. Last night I heard a European starling doing pitch perfect imitation of a meadowlark melody high above me , perched at the peak of a pine tree and laughed. Starling-like indeed and perhaps starlings wish they were a little more like them. I know I do. I hope you enjoy the new art and the rerun of “Starling-like and Overlooked.”

In January, I was at the San Jacinto Wildlife Area, trying to get the hang of my new long lens and capture a new selection of reference photos for art. The refuge was shrouded in dense fog, and I spent the first hour of the morning trying to peer through the haze. When at last, the sun began to pierce the caul, the first rays of freed light flashed across the breast of a western meadow lark. I watched him in awe for five minutes, marveling that he remained visible as he gaped for grubs along the shoreline.

Audubon named the western meadowlark Sturnella neglecta, meaning starling-like and overlooked by most. Although, they are actually an ichterid, and like orioles, they are members of the blackbird family. And I’m not sure they are overlooked as much as they prefer to remain unseen. They embrace the opposite of what I was taught as child, that little girls should be seen and not heard. Meadowlarks often remain unseen but are always heard. I would like to be a meadowlark.

You must walk into a meadow, a stretch of grassland, or a freshly mowed field to find them. They are creatures of unconfined spaces, preferring to hide in plain sight and winking out the moment you fix your eyes on them. There is safety in being overlooked, even if your voice carries.

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It wasn’t until I hunted with a peregrine falcon two decades ago that they truly caught my eye. My first peregrine, Anakin, found their flights irresistible, but the moment he gave chase, an entire flock of meadowlarks would dissolve into the stubble of harvested alfalfa fields. And no matter how far I walked I could not find them again.

Now, flights of meadowlarks immediately draw my close attention because a part of me believes that they flit through spacetime, reappearing where they please. I keep hoping to finally see one blink out of my dimension and into another.

I imagine meadowlarks flitting through doorways I cannot see while singing a ringing song of hope to themselves. And it must be a song of hope, because I cannot hear it without pausing, taking a deep breath and feeling the corners of my mouth lift. Elusive and yet everywhere, a flock of meadowlarks seems to throw their voices in the winter, their call and answer filling the spaces around me while I try and fail to triangulate the source of the sound.

They aren’t a raucous chorus like a flock of blackbirds, creating a singular din. They take turns, respectfully pausing for their friends to celebrate the crisp morning air and the rising sun. Each voice is important. Each voice elevates the spirit of the flock and the beauty of the land. One by one, they celebrate what has always been and praise the moment they are in.

I would like to be a meadowlark, obscuring my cadmium yellow t-shirt beneath a dusty field-worn jacket as I slip through the world unnoticed. I would like to be a meadowlark, lifting my face to the sun, my jacket falling open and my voice ringing out hope in a song that carries farther than any shout. And as soon as all who heard me smiled and turned to find me, I would blink out through an invisible doorway to find another patch of sun and sing again.

Sharp-shinned hawks have always been a mystery to me. While I have worked with and hunted with quite a few Cooper’s hawks and regularly watch them in my neighborhood, sharpies are elusive. Smaller, more wary, and experts at vanishing, they are seldom seen in my yard. When I do see one it is a marvel.

This winter, when a sharp-shinned hawk zipped above my head and landed in the backyard live oak, I gasped and thought, “sharpie!” It was something in the wingbeat and the silhouette. Not that I trusted my instincts. Sharpies and Coops are notoriously hard to tell apart and the center of arguments on every bird watching group or social media page. The camera helped me confirm the identification though and indeed, a juvenile female sharp-shinned hawk who was on her first migration was haunting my backyard and my gamebird aviary.

The first migration is the most dangerous journey for juvenile birds. Young birds may burn fuel faster as their body is still maturing, meaning they may need to catch more food than adults while still gaining the skills to catch it. They are also traversing unfamiliar territory while encountering dangers that are new to them. It only takes one mistake to end their journey permanently. Most sharpies only live to be three years old in the wild and most don’t make it through their first passage.

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The next day, the little sharpie was still in my yard, was making herself more visible, her focus on the birds in my aviary and I started to worry about her. So, I tossed a quail breast on top of the aviary, hoping to give her a boost. She snatched it up and packed off with it as soon as I turned to walk away and I worried more. Tame hawks are dying hawks. Desperate hawks are dead hawks and that looked like desperation to me.

Cooper’s hawks and sharp-shinned hawks are notorious for the things they do in desperation. The stories and the videos are common of the hawk that flew into someone’s house to try to grab a budgie in its cage or the hawk that grandma was able to hand grab when it tried to make a meal of one of her chickens. They do dangerous things that defy logic when their body tells them they are one meal away from dying.

Lately I think I can relate to this state in a way I never have before. Humanity also experiences desperation and it can cause us to lose our moral compass, our ethics, and our good judgement. We do odd things, dangerous things, we act out of character when our nervous system tells us we are not safe and we are helpless to change that. So many of us are acting out of pain and I had been slowly devolving into it myself and didn’t know what to do for myself, but I could do something for the sharpie.

Sharp-shinned hawks are the smallest hawk in North America, their metabolic rate is high, and they have almost no margin to withstand starvation. It doesn’t take long for a sharpie to become emaciated, and it happens exponentially. A few missed meals and the little hawk begins to burn muscle and might increase its energy demands by 30 to 50 percent. As the body consumes itself, desperation begins to set in. A sharp-shinned hawk lives on the metabolic knife’s edge.

The little hawk was back the next day, tamer than before, sitting in the open and meeting my gaze. It would be nice to think that I had earned myself a friend, but a wild sharpie is a biological machine with an inscrutable mind. This wasn’t trust or friendship. It was far more likely that flying away wasn’t worth the caloric cost. A bird in hypoglycemic crisis simply cannot mount a normal fear response.

So, I made my own calculations, took stock of the medications in my raptor supplies, and then I tossed a bal-chatri trap with bait underneath her. She hit the trap, her toes tangling in the slip knots with me standing five feet away. It was a desperate move on her part, but unlike most hail Marys, this one would pay off.

In humans, desperation is defined as a state of hopelessness, helplessness, and despair that occurs when there seems to be no viable solutions to a person’s current state. It comes with a sense of urgency and a strong desire for relief. Psychologists have only recently tried to define desperation as a separate state from anxiety and stress, although the three are hard to untangle.

Recently diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety, and depression, I could recognize the familiar desperation of a passage bird in distress, but I ignored my own. I met with my therapist and my psychiatrist, took my medications, and tried to calm myself with logic when I had night terrors, telling myself that I just needed to be stronger. After all, all my friends were struggling right now and somehow, they were muscling through. I just needed to get better at it. I told myself I had a roof over my head. I had food in the cupboard. I wasn’t a starving sharp-shinned hawk, but humans can starve in so many other ways.

I hooded the little hawk and perched her in a box where she could be still and calm. I weighed her several times a day, entering her weight into a spreadsheet and calculating how many grams she was burning an hour. She was burning 3 grams of food an hour at the beginning. A high rate of burn for 172g hawk. I began treating her with one medication crushed in her food at a time, starting with treating for coccidia, then aspergillosis, frounce, and worms. It took a few weeks to run her through all the medication but her burn rate went down, her tameness went away, and though I tried to convince her I was a friend, her wildness was pure. She brightened up, held her feathers tighter, and she looked at me like I was a dangerous predator.

Admittedly, I imagined I would make friends with the sharp-shinned hawk. I imagined us hunting together and somehow navigating the narrow path of trust we would walk together. I think I thought that if I saved her, she would save me, but nature doesn’t always work that way. It didn’t matter to her that I had saved her. It mattered to her that her world was outside. She wasn’t desperate anymore and she could see the whole of her situation, and it wasn’t to her liking. Healthy and round in the keel, I gave her one last rich meal and released her to the wider wilder world.

I set the sharp-shinned hawk back on her journey, but my world shrank. What should have felt like a good deed, felt like, well, nothing. She had been a lovely distraction but my falconry season with my red-tailed hawk was a disappointment. I was walking for an hour and half and not seeing a single rabbit in places where they had been plentiful the season before. It was likely that rabbit hemorrhagic fever was decimating the population again, but I didn’t know for sure and kept hoping rabbits would reappear. In the meantime, my hawk began to fly off into the distance, hoping that I would call him back for food. There was nothing to hunt and he was learning bad habits. So, I ended my season in January.

Stress ratcheted up at work, the headlines I tried to buffer myself from crept in, another friend died. I hurt. I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t know how to talk about death, loss, isolation, and national news that was triggering my night terrors. I found myself standing in rooms, staring at the wall, and wasn’t sure how long I had been there. I drank to take the edge off the anxiety that shot up my blood pressure and made my heart feel like it was constantly pounding. And then I showed up at a Zoom meeting with my Board of Directors and leadership partner slurring my words but still trying to pretend that I was just fine. I wasn’t just fine though and for the first time, everyone else could see it. I showed up desperate.

I made a couple of calls that night, sobbing that the only solution was going to rehab, but having no idea what to do with my animals. And when there was no help because I didn’t know how to ask, no answers to how to fix myself, and no emotional energy to figure it out, I just collapsed. I spent the next four days curled up in my bed, heart pounding, covered in sweat feeling like I was trying to break a fever that was more likely to break me first.

No one told me that you don’t have to be a black-out binge-drinking drunk to need to detox rather than going cold turkey. I drank 3 or sometimes 4 Buzzballs every evening and had for a month, but I didn’t keep alcohol in the house. So, I went cold turkey, detoxing alone on top of a major anxiety attack, thinking only of everyone I had let down and what a disappointment I was as a person. And that’s where I was on my 55th birthday, in bed, unable to hold down food, covered in heat rash, exhausted, alone, and just wanting it all to be over. All of it.

Five days later, I got up. I took a shower, sat down at my desk and wrote out a timeline of the four months that led up to the moment when I broke. I wrote it to show that I had been trying to get professional help for months, but what came to light was a rapid-fire series of events out of my control that piled on grief, fear, and despair. I had pulled myself up by my bootstraps, but all the while I let my emotional-self starve and diminish to point of disintegration. And I didn’t understand why I did this to myself.

Neither did the professionals helping me. They wondered what they had missed and why they hadn’t seen that I was getting worse instead of better. My psychiatrist had new questions. Had I ever had periods of feeling like I could take on the world and days where I didn’t need sleep? Of course I had, didn’t everyone? But I hadn’t felt that way for quite some time and I missed the highs even though they only lasted a few days. When I felt like this, did I buy things and start new projects that I didn’t finish? Yeah. That’s what artists do. Had anyone ever suggested that I might have Bipolar II? Sometimes I joked that I was bipolar. Bipolar II, I was corrected and it was a working diagnosis, but suddenly turbulent pieces of my life made more sense. I asked what I needed to do and was told I was already doing the first thing. Stop self-medicating. Stop drinking.

There was no doubt that I needed recovery, but I didn’t have an easy answer to what recovery looked like. I spent a month going to AA meetings every day. I read along in the texts and introduced myself as an alcoholic. I tried to take it to heart when I was told repeatedly that alcoholism is a “fatal spiritual malady”, but sobriety didn’t feel like the real challenge. It would have felt more honest to say, my name is Rebecca and I’m desperate, but I don’t know what I’m desperate for.

I’m 80 days sober now, and I don’t yearn to have a drink, I yearn to feel connected again, to have small moments of surprise and joy again. I yearn to feel safe because I belong to a larger whole.

So, I found myself back here, at Written Bird and working on my book A Field Guide to Awe: Recovering Wonder and Connection in Twelve Weeks. Nature girl heal thyself.

The sharpie and I both showed up impaired, unable to see the future, unable to seek help, because we didn’t believe there was help to be found. I saw the sharpie’s last-ditch hope for recovery, an improbable one, a human— and I answered. I answered because in my backyard, I am a piece of the natural world. And I think the best answer to healing, to becoming, and to magic in moments of desperation is always nature. I helped her and I could help myself. I could give myself care and a big dose of wilder places.

I have spent the last two months spending 20 minutes a day outside observing, keeping a notebook of moments of awe, and having a monthly nature date with my camera in hand and curiosity at the ready. I finished a month of essays and art to make sure that Written Bird keeps a steady release of content. And this month I start living A Field Guide to Awe one chapter at a time starting with a sense of place. I never imagined this book as a recovery guide, but for me that’s what it’s going to be. I’ll be writing, drawing, photographing, and exploring my way past desperation.

I released the sharpie after her recovery and I may never see her again, but maybe she’ll see me. I’ll be outside. I’ll be giving myself the same level of care I gave her. We both wanted to be healthy and free and perhaps we both will be granted the same. I won’t get to know her journey, but I welcome you to join me on mine. There is a lot of healing to be done and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one desperate to find it.

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If this essay found you in a hard place — I see you. 988 (call or text) is the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You don't have to be in crisis to use it. Sometimes you just need to talk to someone.

(First run in the Press Enterprise, April 5, 2026)

I’ve been thinking a lot about refraction lately and how in nature and writing, reality is in the eye of the beholder. Spend any length of time observing nature and it will spin a story for you, but how you read it is up to you. Is it a triumph that the Cooper’s hawk is returning to its nest with a house finch for its voracious chicks. Or is it a tragedy that the fragile finch chicks have one less parent to feed them. Nature loves this communion between the observer and reality so much that it is frequent and layered.

This winter I spent time at San Jacinto Wildlife Area trying to get a perfect photograph of a mountain bluebird. Bluebirds hold a firm place in many cultures as a representative of happiness or joy. There is something about the color blue on a living creature that elicits a feeling of well-being, and the mountain bluebird is the purest most saturated shade of sky. I wanted to capture that shade and the feeling. I got my photo, but I couldn’t help pondering the fact that the color was not real.

Whether it is a western, eastern, or mountain bluebird, none of them are actually blue. If you were to find a bluebird feather and grind it up to powder, what remained would be gray. The bluebird of happiness isn’t actually blue at all.

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Blue feathers are structural colors and rather than storing color chemically in cells, the feather barbs contain microscopic structures that interact with light. They absorb some wavelengths and scatter others back toward the viewer. A bluebird’s feathers scatter blue wavelengths and absorb the rest. The color is not a property of the bird. It’s only blue if someone is there to observe it in the light.

Then you must wonder if we are all observing the same shade of blue. After all, your eyes may be structurally different in function than mine and even a different color. Although we would probably disagree on what color my eyes are because they are gray.

Gray eyes contain almost no pigment. The iris stroma, the layer that gives eyes their color, also has more collagen than other eye colors, scattering all wavelengths of light more evenly. This dependence on structural light scattering makes them changeable from gray to greenish gray to a variety of blues.

Yet, my eyes are not blue, and neither are bluebird feathers. Blue belongs to whoever is looking. The blue belongs to the reader.

I sometimes find myself struggling to craft words that leave no room for interpretation or feelings other than my own. I want everyone to see the colors I am seeing. I know what I mean, and I want the reader to feel triumphant for the hawk. More than that I want them to know me, the writer, exactly as I represent myself on the page. Despite a lifetime of arguing about something that should be as straightforward as the color of my eyes, I still think I can control refraction and how my story is read. Yet, I think perhaps, what the reader brings is as important as what I present to them.

Perhaps writing that leaves room for the light to refract is doing nature’s work. I can create the conditions for meaning, but I can’t control the light source. I can’t control what the reader carries into the encounter. I can leave them room to lean into a recent loss and feel for the finch if that’s what they bring to the page. Or perhaps the reader will come to the page on the high of new romance and root for the hawk as I secretly did.

If I can manage to leave room for refraction, perhaps someone I’ve never met, in a moment I couldn’t have predicted, in a light I didn’t know existed, will find themselves in my words. And if I left enough space for it, perhaps the words will refract into a seemingly impossible shade of blue, a shade that only this particular reader can see.

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Do animals get angry? Do they rage? I’ve often wondered about this, especially when I consider my distaste for the introduced Eurasian doves in my neighborhood. They look so sweet and beautiful until they are fighting anything and everything that they see as invading their territory. And they truly believe they can win any battle.

“Fighting is risky in the state of nature because injuries are often fatal when there’s no paramedic to patch you up. The animal brain is skilled at sizing up its adversary. It only attacks when it expects to win, or when there is no possibility of escape.” According to Loretta G. Breuning Ph.D. in her article Animal Anger: An evolutionary approach to anger surges and relief published in Psychology Today in May 2017.

But what if an animal always expects to win. Eurasian doves are introduced to North America and they don’t have the acquired genetics to know when they can or cannot win with certain adversaries. And what some people might find admirable, I find deplorable. Aggression is not a tool allowed to me in modern society.

My rage has no place in a natural world where men are stronger and more powerful sociologically than I am. Fight or flight is almost flight for a woman, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel rage; there’s just no place to put it. I wonder what it would be like to be allowed to be angry and more than that to be allowed to express rage. The potential is so frightening that I don’t even want to rage in private, because what if it slips out publicly? I already know no one will protect me. I already know I’ll be completely dismissed and no opinion I have after will matter.

I was a teenager and in early my 20s before the Violence Against Women Act had been passed. I had already raged at a live-in boyfriend, confronting him with the other girlfriend and the result was being grabbed by my neck and strangled in a public place. The other girlfriend was heartbroken, because he obviously loved me more than he ever admitted or he wouldn’t have grabbed me by the throat.

And I was just lucky it happened in public because even though no one was going to stand against it, it’s still bad form to kill a woman with witnesses outside of another woman who would be happy if she was dead.

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I have always understood that being angry could get me killed, even if my anger was entirely justified.

This was made apparent several years later when I was stalked by a next-door neighbor who would pound on my front door in the middle of the night or jump over the wall in the back patios that adjoined our condos and pound on my bedroom window. I heard him fire guns once. I called the police three times begging for help, and the fourth time, sleep deprived and having already asked the owners of both condos to help with no result, I raged at them. That was a mistake.

They didn’t respond to any calls after, at least not until my neighbor walked through my front door and pointed a loaded pistol at my baby half-brother. My brother was only 18. And even our mom didn’t care what was happening to me until the boy in the family was in danger. That mattered.

The police busted down my neighbor’s door and tackled him in the shower. Then they found a myriad of guns, a flak jacket, and a pistol with a round in the chamber — the pistol that was pointed at my brother.

I don’t think my dad could understand what exactly was happening to me, even though he owned the condo I was renting. It was my rage that shut everyone down. My rage was simply dismissed as female hysteria until a young man almost lost his life.

I didn’t mean to do this to my brother, but it probably saved my life. I invited him to go to the San Diego Comicon with me because I was working for Image Comics and could make introductions. He didn’t need them. He’s famous now in his own right, but the people who wouldn’t listen to me hadn’t been enraged by my stalker pointing a loaded gun at him, I might very well be dead.

I made the mistake of being angry about what was happening to me. My anger, while justified, meant that the police officers rolled their eyes and dismissed me. It’s unacceptable for women to be angry and troublesome, especially when they live alone.

“The animal brain only responds to threats that it can see, hear or smell. It does not imagine potential future threats the way the human brain can. We humans can activate threat signals internally without relying on external inputs. This ability has helped us survive by imagining the winter cold in time to stockpile wood in the summer. But it can also leave us with a lot of anger,” according to Bruening.

I am manipulative because I’m not allowed to be angry. Men gain influence being angry. Women lose influence according to a 2015 Study published in Science Daily. I’m not proud of being manipulative, groveling and ingratiating myself to be taken seriously. In fact, I’m ashamed of it. But it’s the only path that has ever been effective for me and the dismissals for women’s opinions are hard and fast these days. I don’t know what else to do. And I don’t know what to do with a rage built on 55 years of not being protected and not being safe and still not knowing what to do.

I wish I was a Eurasian dove. They don’t anticipate their death by hubris. I have seen them hit by cars and taken by hawks because they are so certain in their invulnerability. I wish I knew what it felt like to believe I was invulnerable.

Maybe rage has a place in nature, but it is not a place that afforded to human women.

Our annual fundraising gala for Rivers & Lands Conservancy was last week and this is the speech I gave. Yet, there were so many more people I thought of as I was writing people, people who weren’t there but inspire me and some them read Written Bird. So, I’m sharing it with you.

These are hard times, divisive times, and in truth, the sort of times when it is difficult to soothe our souls. It is hard to know where to look for inspiration or a feeling of belonging. So lately, I’ve been trying to focus on the gifts we are given without expectation of reciprocity.

These gifts surround us. They are as simple as exhaling carbon dioxide in a natural flow to plants, only to have it returned to us as oxygen. Nature functions as a gift economy and what is available in abundance is given freely. Perhaps the best thing we can do for ourselves in times like these is to reframe our natural resources as what they actually are, gifts. We have been given so many gifts.

What we have in abundance, we often share with other beings. Whether we recognize it or not, it’s a lesson we learn from nature and replicate. The water we have flowing from our taps is an abundance not available to wildlife in the heat of the summer. So, we put water out for the bees and the birds. We have plenty to share, at least for now, and it doesn’t even occur to us what the wildlife might do for us in return. We may plant native plants that feed and shelter wildlife in our gardens. We don’t do this because we are obligated or expect anything, we do it because it feels like belonging and like gratitude for being invited to belong.

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These acts seem so simple that I suppose we begin to take them for granted. At least, we take them for granted until nature gives us a gift we weren’t expecting. Honestly, it had been feeling like a chore feeding the summer house finches who themselves are abundant and easily overlooked in our yards. We hope for charismatic birds to visit our feeders, and charisma is defined by scarcity and bright colors.

House finches are like a fingerprint though, each male dons its colored feathers in a different arrangement. Their breast and face may be bright red, orange and occasionally yellow. Some have just a blush of color and others shine like jewels in the sun. There are so many ways to be a house finch.

So, I started photographing them and drawing them as individuals rather than as a species. As I became more familiar with their variety, I began to see that the abundance was not just in numbers but in the range of differences and possibilities for each individual. It made the world feel larger. It made me feel smaller, but in the best possible way.

I had been pondering the endless possibilities of house finches when nature decided to show me one that seemed impossible. One morning mixed in the riot of reds and oranges was a pure white house finch. I had never seen a leucistic finch before and as 1 in 30,000 bird, I probably never will again. I called him Moby Finch. Moby was older bird molting out his brittle white feathers and he hung out for a few weeks allowing me to capture his charisma with my camera.

I wondered what it was like to be so different and obvious to predators. I wondered how Moby had survived so long. I wondered if he had a mate. I wanted to protect him. I wanted him to be celebrated. I wanted to be as brave as a pure white finch in a harsh world. And yet, aren’t we all just as unlikely as any of the possibilities of a house finch. Aren’t we all as much of a singular gift as all the rest of what nature gifts to us?

This realization colored with nature’s careful palette made me realize how much I have to give. What happens when you water an oak? That seedling becomes your sense of place, of possibility, and of being a part of a timeless cycle that has always existed and always will. We give. We belong. And we thrive.

You are people who not only believe in the gift economy but live it. This is how we get through hard times, and this is how we appreciate and give nature a hand. It is how we uplift ourselves.

You are all a part of something so much bigger than any one of us or the times we live in. You are all unique and impactful to the people you love and your communities. You represent so many examples of the possibilities, not of finches, but of people. And the possibilities astound me. So, thank you. Thank you for all you do for nature.

A year and a half ago or so I had to call animal control. I was trying to check the collar on a wayward husky, and I got bitten hard enough to draw blood. I was reticent about calling because I didn’t want anything to happen to the dog and I hate bringing attention to myself as a falconer. However, I’ve also been bitten by domestic animals, had to go to the doctor when the bite got infected, and have had enough rabies shots for both professional and nonprofessional reasons to never want any again. Also, I don’t want other people, especially children, being bitten.

So, I weighed my options and then met one of our local animal control officers. She was young by my terms (early 30s maybe) and was both kind and whip smart. She didn’t want any harm to come to the dog either and as one does when they meet another true animal person, I told her more than I probably should have. I explained that I was a falconer. I told her about the years I had spent working in zoos. And then I told her that although I wasn’t a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, if she ever found herself in a bind with a raptor or a corvid, I always have a freezer full or carnivore and omnivore food. I was so charmed by her and her obviously huge heart, that I told her to call me if she was ever in a pinch. And I gave her my number.

Flash forward to this May. I was sitting in the dentist’s office 20 miles aways and I got a text that said, “This is Officer Grant. I have a crow and my rehabber isn’t answering. Can you help?” I said, “yes” and asked her what time she got off. Then I tried to meet her before 5pm, but we passed each other on my street because she was on her way to pick up a rattlesnake at the middle school football field.

Officer Grant did not get off at 5pm like she was supposed to and instead showed up at my house with a corvid who was not quite fledged. I recognized the complaint of a raven as soon as she pulled it out of the back of her truck in a collapsible cage.

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I think everyone can guess how hard it is to be an animal control officer, and I live in a particularly difficult town for animal control. We’re a little rural in places, very much a melting pot of cultures, and the census proclaims us economically depressed. Loose dogs on my street are an everyday occurrence. Honestly, I’m shocked that animal control has time for a raven, even if it has been sitting in someone’s backyard for three days. This decision spoke more to the person that delivered the raven than it did to system. And that’s why I took it. I took the raven for Officer Grant.

I gave the nestling raven a once-over before I popped her in the crate and proclaimed her in good condition, perhaps a little thin, but it’s hard to tell with young birds. Then I gave the raven a couple of mice I had thawed while I waiting and covered the crate on my porch for the night.

The truth is that I hate spring. I always get at least a handful, if not dozens, of requests to help with baby birds. I almost always say “no” and try to direct people to someone who is licensed, which is increasingly difficult in my region. Part of this is the heartbreak that comes with not being able to save every animal I would love to save. I have no idea how wildlife rehabilitators have the fortitude for this.

The other part is because I am licensed to be a falconer and California Department of Fish & Wildlife wardens can show up at my door and demand an inspection at any time. (And they have simply because someone on social reported me for illegalities the reporter fabricated.) It’s not fun to have wardens show up on your doorstep in flak jackets and fully armed demanding an inspection you can’t refuse, no matter how nice they are about it. I don’t own my hawks, the service does, and they can take them away at any time they decide to do so. No matter how good you are, you’re always being judged.

I didn’t follow Mikayla Raines of Save A Fox Rescue, but my social media has been flooded with tributes to her life and work doing rehabilitation for fur trade foxes after her suicide. I understand how horrible animal people can be to another. I acutely feel the pain of the judgement of others who know better and assert they could do better than me even after 40 years of caring for the raptors, corvids, and parrots I know best. I wish we could do better for each other.

Still, I took this raven. I took her because of someone who was doing a job that would break my heart, and was still doing it with a smile and hope. I took the raven for Officer Grant.

I have a perfect screened-in porch for birds to grow up in. When they are ready to leave the crate, they can view the world, talk to their “people” and learn to fly without hurting themselves. I also completely renovated this porch for myself two years ago with new stucco, paint, curtains and furniture, swearing I would never raise a bird on it again, but along came Margaery, the raven. You’d think I’d know better by now.

I fed Margaery well and figured I had two weeks before she was flying and could join the other raven parents in the neighborhood. So, I could help Officer Grant and get this bird back to the wild potentially before I ran into any trouble. I also had something we didn’t have years ago, which was access to falcon medication developed in Saudi Arabia and now for sale in the states. They work for ravens too. I could run her through a round of Vet-All-In-One, worm her, and treat her for body parasites. Which I did.

And while she loved me while she was sick and I thought we were friends, things changed once she was fattened up and healthy. She was happy to jump on my hand to go back in the crate, but happier to poke me in the forehead with her monstrous beak. I have never felt less appreciated by a bird. So, I gave her distance and food.

However, the truth is, I wasn’t doing this for Margaery. I was doing it for Officer Grant who I texted updates while I sighed at the raven who was more interested in hanging out with my dogs through the porch window than she would ever be hanging out with me.

Eventually, I texted Officer Grant that if she needed a bright spot in her day she could drive by my house and likely see Margaery on the window sill of my porch staring out at the world she would soon own. I told her that I would be opening the door to the raven’s new world in a couple of days. Officer Grant’s response was that I could have no idea how much she needed that text. The thing was that I needed even more.

Yes, I made a difference for one raven, but I did it for a person. And when Margaery left two days later, she joined up with the local raven pair and never looked back. I’m so glad she had a good ending, but that wasn’t my sole or even my most important reason for helping her. I did it because I could make a difference for a person I admired in a world where I feel like I make little difference. I did it because if we can’t help and care about each other, we will never be able to help the natural world.

Also, Margaery, wherever you are. You’re an ungrateful cow. And I wish you the best.

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Originally Published in the SoCalNewsgroup on June 8, 2025
https://www.pressenterprise.com/2025/06/05/the-concept-of-a-gift-economy-and-its-parallel-with-nature/?share=cweaccslnrrpidnelrs5

Recently, I listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World” knowing I would enjoy it because I love all of Kimmerer’s work. More than this, I knew the metaphor at the core of the book was wrapped around the story of birds and berries. I love birds. I love berries. However, I wasn’t expecting to find myself pondering all that I love and the sheer abundance of these gifts.

“The Serviceberry” explores the concept of gift economies and their parallel with nature. While Kimmerer gorges on serviceberries along with the cedar waxwings, she marvels over the fact that she has done nothing to earn or deserve these berries, and yet, they are gifted to her and all the wildlife that discovers them. She responds with gratitude and the desire to reciprocate. Should she weed around the tree, donate to a local land trust, offer up a song in the wind, or create art to share with others? I suspect she did all these things, but the most evident to me is, of course, her delightful 120-page love song to gifting what you have in abundance.

The turbulence of this winter and spring have left me thinking more about what I have to lose than what I have to give. Kimmerer’s book shifted my focus to begin marveling at the gift economy of my neighborhood, an economy that began when my Hungarian neighbors, Susan and Laszlo, moved in across the street.

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My relationship with Susan and Laszlo began with small gifts, but we are not allowed to buy gifts. If I pick up a bottle of Slivovitz for them or order something they need from Amazon, I am not allowed to wave them off as gifts. I purchased it and dollars will be exchanged. This is not the gift economy that Kimmerer speaks of in her book. Her story is one of what we share freely when there is abundance and with no expectation of reciprocation.

When Laszlo discovers they have more produce than one older couple can eat, I will find a bag of vegetables on my porch to feed my tortoise. In turn, if I make an angel food cake and know that I have no business eating all those calories alone, I arrive with the cake at their doorstep to share.

However, it was the black-headed grosbeaks that I thought of when I read “The Serviceberry.” Susan marvels over the number of hummingbirds and songbirds at my feeders. Then she grumbles about how so few birds come to hers. When she spotted the annual influx of migrating grosbeaks and their bright, flashing wings, she needed to know the secret to attracting them. Fortunately, I had the secret in abundance. I gave her 5 pounds of black oil sunflower seed and warned her that the grosbeaks would only be here a couple weeks.

What happened because of that gift astounded me. I have fed the April flock of grosbeaks for two decades. I would guess the annual flock builds to about 40 or so birds before they head to higher elevations. Yet, one evening, sitting on my porch, I watched the feeding grosbeaks scatter from Susan’s and my yard simultaneously, startled by a passing hawk. It was as if an orange and yellow confetti cannon had been aimed into the pine trees. There were hundreds of them.

Over shots of Slivovitz and crispy csörögefánk, Susan apologized for “stealing” all my birds. I laughed and explained that she hadn’t stolen them at all. In fact, to my delight, they had somehow multiplied into an extravagance of grosbeaks the likes of which I had never seen in my yard.

That’s a gift economy. Somehow, as Kimmerer points out, the currency of gratitude and reciprocity is not so much an exchange as it is a multiplier of abundance. When I think about creating art to bolster the gift economy, I find myself inspired again. In fact, this story is an expression of my gratitude and so, the cycle continues. What a gift!

One Sunday afternoon this Spring, I decided I was so irritated with myself and my attitude that I wanted a divorce. I couldn’t figure out how one does that exactly, and surely the paperwork is onerous and confusing. So, instead, I thought perhaps I could do something to reframe the endless stream of garbage in my head.

I needed something to focus on that had nothing to do with work, relationships, chores, or fears for the future. So, I picked up a blank notebook and settled under a pine in my front yard across from the bird feeders. I vowed that for 20 minutes I would sit perfectly still and concentrate on every detail of the visiting birds. I’m terrible at field journaling and can’t draw without a reference photo. So, I thought I would just jot down the species I saw and try to clear my mind.

It didn’t really work. I was uncomfortable. And I was bored. Even the birds at my feeder looked disinterested. It was just the regulars cracking seeds without gusto and even the fueling migrants seemed distracted by a better destination. I was about to admit defeat when I looked up and spotted the tiny silhouette of a red-tailed hawk in between the branches of the Aleppo pine.

That in itself wasn’t unusual. I am very familiar with the red-tailed hawks I’ve shared my neighborhood with for 22 years and I see them soaring in thermals frequently. What caught my attention was that it had pulled in its wings and was rapidly dropping in my direction. It was a perfect straight-line stoop from at least 500 feet that ended with the flaring of its wings and a graceful landing on a bough 50 feet directly above me.

The birds at my feeder scattered and I groaned, lifting my chin to grumble, “Come on, man!” and then I realized the hawk was bent over and staring directly down at me. “Um, hi?” I said and we both settled again, me waiting for the hawk to leave and she, the female of the pair I’ve always called the Red Queen, waiting for whatever she was waiting for … for me to do something maybe? As we continued to give each other furtive glances, I finally admitted to myself that it wasn’t happenstance. She had to come to see me.

While I waited for her departure, I found myself thinking about the places I hunt with my own hawks the most frequently and how I eventually get to a place where I both see and am seen. The quail recognize me, the rabbits recognize me, and I recognize the wild raptors and coyotes that could be a problem for my bird. We all see each other as part of the landscape eventually, recognizing the sounds and movement of one another’s arrivals and departures. It’s what makes me feel like I’m a part of place. In fact, years ago, one summer when I was hunting California quail with a young Cooper’s hawk named Elsa, I had a moment when I realized our hunting ground knew me better than I knew it.

We hunted every evening in the chaparral a mile up the road from my house and it didn’t take long for the quail to recognize my truck, but that didn’t surprise me. Quail are smart because everything wants to eat them. In fact, Elsa caught very few of them and it didn’t matter much to me because my evening hike was always a delightfully exhausting adventure. I beat brush and scaled hills, and Elsa sprinted after the birds that flushed in front of us. Then one day, after tracking a covey of quail I had already flushed twice, Elsa became very intrigued by something behind us. I wanted to move the quail again thinking this was her best chance, but I needed her attention. So, I turned to follow her gaze.

In the brush at a very respectful distance, a bobcat was waiting. My heart leapt for a moment, thinking more of my tiny hawk than myself, but the cat was relaxed. It was waiting for something. And it was a good distance away, but I thought I saw a slow blink. So, I turned back to Elsa, whose attention was again fully on the quail skittering in the lemonade berry, and I jumped in to flush them.

Elsa’s was halfhearted about her chase which was disappointing. So, I turned again to look at the bobcat. She was no longer stationary. She was leaping after the quail that had flushed behind us. I grinned, my disappointment dissolved, and tracked a portion of the fleeing flock of quail and tried again. For the last 20 minutes of light, we all hunted together, and I understood to my bones for the first time that I was a part of nature too. I knew this because I was seen, not just as a human, but as a component of how we can all survive.

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After 15 minutes or so, I realized that there would no be songbirds at my feeder to add to my list or to watch as long as the Red Queen was there. So, I turned my face to the branch above me and decided to draw her. As I noted, I’m terrible at field drawings. I scratched at the paper, erased and tried again to start the shape of her body. I drew an eye, a wing, her head, grumbled, and then looked up to see why my sketch didn’t look quite right.

The Red Queen, with her acute eyesight, had tilted her head as if she was intrigued, her neck stretching past her feet to get a better view below. She didn’t look impressed. “If you’re going to criticize, go someplace else,” I mumbled, but she kept watching.

I’ve known the Red Queen for 22 years and perhaps she been watching me longer than I know. She was across the street and working on her nest with a mate when I my bought my house in Banning. And I know it’s been her all these years because red-tailed hawks have such variable plumage and I’ve compared all the old photos I took in the early years.

She is old for a red-tailed hawk, especially when you think about all the mistakes that can lead to their death. They could miss the head when they catch a rattlesnake, get hit by a car, land on the wrong pole and get electrocuted or lose their lives to a .22 while being tempted by a flock of backyard chickens. None of these things are fair and some just aren’t right, but they make for a short life when you’re a hawk.

The oldest recorded banded red-tailed was just over 30 years old when it died, but that’s rare if not unprecedented. I figure the Red Queen has to be at least 25, because she had the deep brown eyes of an older adult when I met her. She could quite possibly be older than that. I wonder what all she has seen. I found myself thinking how incredible it was that she not just noticed me, but that I was seen by her as well.

I know the Red Queen knows me because she made short work of my pigeons when I had a flying flock. In fact, she had no concerns about catching them right of front of me while I wailed, “NOOOOO. That one was my favorite.”

She also knows me because over the years I’ve saved a few of her young, either fallen from the nest or when they were fledglings. One year, I came home to find a baby red-tailed hawk squeezed into a parakeet cage on my porch. I’m not really sure who found it or how they decided I was right person to foist it on. There wasn’t a note. That was 15 years ago and I suppose I’ll never know, but I put the baby in an empty hawk house I had that summer. I fed it like I would feed my falconry birds and when it could fly, it had a view of its natal nest from the perch against its barred window. And when its siblings started flying, I let it loose and the Red Queen finished raising it with its brother and sister. I’ve always figured she thought I kidnapped her kid, but who really knows what a hawk thinks about what it sees. That’s kind of the beauty of it.

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I was trying really hard to see her while I forced myself to be a field artist. And while I laughed at myself for making the Red Queen lopsided, I wondered if she had noticed how I’ve aged in past two decades. Is this part of the intrigue for her? Does she remember when I was 32, full of energy and youthful beauty? Can she see with her keen eyesight the fine wrinkles that spread from eyes and the corners of mouth from smiling. Does she see me and pause like I do when I see myself in the mirror, expecting a young woman? Is this fascinating to a hawk that never ages? Because birds, even if they did memorize what they see in mirror in their youth, simply never change until the end is near. She is as young as the day I met her, except that I know she’s not.

Over the years I came to expect three delightful dumb juvenile hawks in my yard every June. Here’s where I’ve saved her kids again. The fledgling that thought it was a good idea to get thoroughly soaked in the neighbor’s sprinklers and then run out into traffic, for example. Then eventually she only raised two a year and then only one. Then for the last five years none. Her mates have changed over the years and the male that’s with her now is young. (Good for you, Bro. You couldn’t have a better teacher in survival.) Yet, it’s been undeniable that we have faced the end of our reproductive years together. It’s done for me, but she keeps building nests, and I keep rooting her on.

As I drew, I found myself apologizing to her, not just for the crappy drawing but for the jerks who had cut down her nest the month before. The home where the tree is rooted was torn down to the frame and rebuilt over the spring. I was happy to see the house restored, but construction workers who lop off the boughs of old pines, especially ones with a nest after February, are disregarding everything I’ve come to adore about my street. My neighbors aren’t just the people I’ve come to love.

I cried, but I knew she and her mate might build a new nest in another pine. There was enough time. I know that things change, but the choice to change things for the sake of one person’s desire with no regard to unintended consequences was too hard for me. I could accept an arborist’s decision for the sake of the tree, but not ignorant butchers destroying the nest. This was especially true of a nest that I watched generations of young raptors take to the air for their first time.

I apologized to the Red Queen for all that humans do and for all that I cannot do enough to make it better. And I tried a little harder to see her, because I realized that I dreaded the day I would no longer see her again. And realized how little all the garbage in my head really mattered. It’s been a hard year, but it’s always a hard year for the Red Queen. The shrinking hunting grounds that taught her to use houses as blind to hunt grosbeaks, the droughts that taught her to hunt gophers in irrigated lawns, West Nile Disease, lost nests, there was always a way. She was indomitable.

She is indomitable. The Red Queen and her consort built a new nest. They chose a tree I can still see from my porch. It’s hard not to wonder if they chose the location because we want to see each other. That’s unlikely. It probably had the right structure, windbreak, and sunlight. I’ll never get to know exactly. What do know though, is that for the first time in five years she successfully fledged a chick.

I thought I heard a baby red-tailed hawk begging on my street last Saturday. Then I figured it wasn’t a thought, just a hope. Then on Sunday it was an undeniable call. I tracked it down by sound to find a young tiercel red-tailed hawk in a tree next door to my house. I got my camera out just in time to capture the Red Queen luring him one street over to hand off a gopher snake and to start teaching him what you need to know to survive.

The thing is, I think she taught me too. What she taught me was that it’s never over. Don’t get me wrong, I’m squarely in menopause. That story is done for me and I’m good with that, but it’s not the only good story left for me to tell.

Nature doesn’t quit and I’m a part of nature. I see nature and it sees me, and we are in this together, always. I don’t need a divorce from myself. I just need hope. I too, am indomitable.

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It’s been a hard year to balance. And I’m exhausted with the pressures of (once again) unprecedented times as a nonprofit leader with a focus on fundraising for conservation. So, I needed a little time for sorting words. I’ll be honest. I don’t write for my readers, I just hope I can bring you along. I write to explain things to myself. And I’ve had a really hard time explaining things to myself lately. In the meantime, I’ve been making a lot of art without narrative.

So, here is the the mockingbird who has been delighting me in the street-wide karaoke battles in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, I’m not a mockingbird so my amazement at his pitch perfect scrub jay seems to have not have been as impressive with the local female as it was to me. But I still think he’s a rockstar.

Tomorrow morning, you will receive a longer essay than I normally write about what it means to be seen in nature. And then I have my normal 600-800 word essays with art lined up that are less MFA writer and more personable column lined up.

Thank you SO much for still being here even though I haven’t been meeting expectations.

xoxo Rebecca

The white-crowned sparrows arrive in Southern California in January, flocking together to forage and rising in waves when you walk along the edges of the chaparral. Their feathers are as cryptic as any other little brown job moving through the bush and I never seem to mark the moment they have arrived. Yet, at some point, I find myself scanning my surroundings for a Cooper’s hawk in response to their chipping alarm call. Then I notice the smartly striped crowns of the males and realize that the days have started getting long and that winter is almost half over.

Gambel’s white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii) are the most common subspecies that descend into the scrub and grassy open spaces where I live, arriving from their breeding grounds in Alaska and Canada. And while it’s their alarm calls that I recognize most readily, their song is one that has been analyzed more deeply by scientists than perhaps of any other animal. They sing the song of home.

In the first few months of their lives, the males learn to sing from their surrounds. What they hear is what they learn and they carry their song for thousands of miles to their wintering grounds and return to sing near where they were raised. Because of this, white-crowned sparrows have regional dialects. Many songbirds have regional dialects, but the differences are more conspicuous and easier to delineate in white-crowned sparrows.

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I’m terrible at identifying birds by their songs and doubt I’d ever notice that my sparrows had an accent, but I suspect a part of me knows. The white-crowned sparrows that congregate in my yard bring the sound of their home to mine. Perhaps my yard is a unique combination of dialects that I couldn’t hear anywhere else but at my own home. Or perhaps the white-crowned sparrows travel together and I have “sister yards” that share my soundscape.

I always wonder who has “my birds” when they aren’t with me. Perhaps right now, a middle-aged woman in Mexico is blowing steam off a cup of strong coffee while she ponders the same hooded orioles who spent the summer terrorizing my scrub jays and weaving palm frond nests. Are they gulping down winter berries while hanging from the branches in her yard? Has she offered them slices of newly ripened oranges, hoping they’ll linger a while longer before heading north?

If I met her, perhaps we’d struggle with my bad Spanish if she didn’t speak English, but I know we would manage. Over bites of Mexican chocolate, grainy with sugar and sips of smoky mezcal, we would find a way to discover everything we had in common. What we shared would start with a smile over the sun flare wings of a migrant oriole, and from the there the list would grow. I just can’t image that the people who have “my birds” the other half of the year could be very much different from me.

In fact, perhaps what would serve me best these days is not imagining who “those people” are when I take in the news but instead imagining the people who share my favorite migratory birds with me. I know these people. They are real to me. They are my “sister yards” in far off places but we are all taking in the same joy. In fact, the white-crowned sparrows are starting to head to their spring homes now. So, Sister Yards be on the lookout. I’m sending my best wishes with them.

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In January, I was at the San Jacinto Wildlife Area, trying to get the hang of my new long lens and capture a new selection of reference photos for art. The refuge was shrouded in dense fog, and I spent the first hour of the morning trying to peer through the haze. When at last, the sun began to pierce the caul, the first rays of freed light flashed across the breast of a western meadow lark. I watched him in awe for five minutes, marveling that he remained visible as he gaped for grubs along the shoreline.

Audubon named the western meadowlark Sturnella neglecta, meaning starling-like and overlooked by most. Although, they are actually an ichterid, and like orioles, they are members of the blackbird family. And I’m not sure they are overlooked as much as they prefer to remain unseen. They embrace the opposite of what I was taught as child, that little girls should be seen and not heard. Meadowlarks often remain unseen but are always heard. I would like to be a meadowlark.

You must walk into a meadow, a stretch of grassland, or a freshly mowed field to find them. They are creatures of unconfined spaces, preferring to hide in plain sight and winking out the moment you fix your eyes on them. There is safety in being overlooked, even if your voice carries.

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It wasn’t until I hunted with a peregrine falcon two decades ago that they truly caught my eye. My first peregrine, Anakin, found their flights irresistible, but the moment he gave chase, an entire flock of meadowlarks would dissolve into the stubble of harvested alfalfa fields. And no matter how far I walked I could not find them again.

Now, flights of meadowlarks immediately draw my close attention because a part of me believes that they flit through spacetime, reappearing where they please. I keep hoping to finally see one blink out of my dimension and into another.

I imagine meadowlarks flitting through doorways I cannot see while singing a ringing song of hope to themselves. And it must be a song of hope, because I cannot hear it without pausing, taking a deep breath and feeling the corners of my mouth lift. Elusive and yet everywhere, a flock of meadowlarks seems to throw their voices in the winter, their call and answer filling the spaces around me while I try and fail to triangulate the source of the sound.

They aren’t a raucous chorus like a flock of blackbirds, creating a singular din. They take turns, respectfully pausing for their friends to celebrate the crisp morning air and the rising sun. Each voice is important. Each voice elevates the spirit of the flock and the beauty of the land. One by one, they celebrate what has always been and praise the moment they are in.

I would like to be a meadowlark, obscuring my cadmium yellow t-shirt beneath a dusty field-worn jacket as I slip through the world unnoticed. I would like to be a meadowlark, lifting my face to the sun, my jacket falling open and my voice ringing out hope in a song that carries farther than any shout. And as soon as all who heard me smiled and turned to find me, I would blink out through an invisible doorway to find another patch of sun and sing again.

Video taken by Nicole Padron, Co-Executive Director of Rivers & Lands Conservancy (and my leadership partner) on one of the conservancy’s preserves in Southern California.

I have never been a great dog trainer. I can bring a wild hawk into my home, convince him I have value, and build a strong enough relationship with him to get him flying free and willingly returning to my glove. I have trained parrots to vocalize on cue in front of crowds. I once taught a wild kookaburra to land on my hand in return for a mouse so that he would stop stealing them from my bucket. This took understanding natural behavior, communicating without shared language, and having something of value to offer a wild creature. Dogs, however, confound me. They seem to think most of my value is just being me. Sometimes they do something simply because they know it will make me smile. It’s weird. It confuses me. And I love it.

I often wonder why humans crafted the relationships, personalities, and shapes of individual breeds. For example, the mini dachshund. Who thought it was a good idea to carefully breed for a fiercely stubborn dog on stubby legs with a wicked sense of humor and a penchant for running the entire household? To hunt badgers, sure, but I’m not sure where the sly humor and royal demands play into that. Perhaps though, this is a question I should be asking myself, because I find it utterly charming even when I’m slightly irritated.

One of my greatest pleasures this season has been watching my mini long-haired dachshund pup, Ripley find her footing in the field. There is something in her blood that sings to her and says that purpose and fulfillment are just ahead on a strange scent. I wish we could all hear that song when we start to get near our calling, that we could all be so certain of our true place in the world. It’s enough though, to live the moment through her.

I do believe that dogs are as entwined in nature as the humans that imagined their potential in the earliest of days and those who love them now. I think this because there is nothing that gives me greater joy than watching my dogs work with my hawks in the field. Their joy is expansive and carries you along with it.

When my dogs see something I do not, I look harder. When they are on their nose, I breathe more deeply. And while I feel like I can only be invited glimpses of a hawk’s world, the dogs expand the borders of my own. We shaped dogs to be an extension of ourselves and indeed they widen our senses. They extend us deeper into the secrets and surprises of a wilder world.

There are a thousand reasons to extoll the virtues of dogs. It has all been written before and they bring so much into our homes. Sometimes though, I wonder if the one true reason humans drew dogs into their sphere was simply to bridge the gap between us and all that is wild. After all, the greatest adventures are the ones that can be shared with a truest friend. Perhaps we’re more likely to get our desperately needed time in nature if our adventure buddy has an excellent nose and four strong (if not long) legs.

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The Delhi sands flower-loving fly (Rhaphiomidas terminatus abdominalis) is approximately one-inch long, hovers like a hummingbird when sipping nectar, and dies within two weeks of emerging from the ground as an adult. It isn’t hard to overlook.

Its habitat, the Colton Dunes, which is a complex of fine Delhi sand formations, has a history of being ignored, neglected, and reimagined for commerce by communities in Southern California. Yet, a handful of entomologists were willing to fight for it despite the deeply divisive politics involved. Bringing construction to a halt anywhere in inland Southern California in the 1990’s is a fight I’m not sure I would have had the fortitude to face. In fact, I’m ashamed to admit that I’m not sure I have the stomach to stand up in that sort of melee thirty years later.

Yet, I know and love the Delhi sand formation, which in the counties of Riverside and San Bernardino (the only place in the world they can be found) we call the Colton Dunes. They are the creation of thousands of years of scouring Santa Ana winds carving out the Cajon Pass and depositing fine sand.

I “grew up” as a falconer in the early 90s and was hunting in what remained of the Colton Dunes when entomologist Greg Balmer petitioned for an emergency listing of the Delhi sands flower-loving fly (DSF) in 1990. He succeeded in championing their USFWS endangered listing status in 1993. Most of the dunes I hunted across with my first red-tailed hawk, Sadie, were already degraded, and to be honest, I never understood why there were swathes of sand deposited between our much more common chaparral and coastal sage scrub habitat. I just knew that returned home weary and fulfilled, shook the sand out of my boots, and that this meant I was home. And the older I got, the more I treasured the mysteries of the places where I believed I belonged.

The DSF remains mostly unknown and still a mystery to entomologists. It is also endemic to a habitat that most people, including those who live next to it, don’t know exist. It is presumed that the DSF spend 98% in their larval stage, hunting or foraging for food beneath the surface. Studies have pointed to DSF larvae placidly grazing plant matter like manatees in their ocean made of fine sand. They have also pointed to a voracious and predatory larval state opportunistically hunting like sharks. Other studies suggest that like other flies in the less than 30 species of the Rhaphiomidas genera, they may be obligate predators of certain ant species, like orcas hunting seal populations. It’s also possible they shift between all three depending on their larval state. We just don’t know yet.

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At Rivers & Lands Conservancy, where I’m a co-executive director with my leadership partner, Nicole Padron, the Conservancy has become the lynch pin in not only conserving what remains of the Colton Dunes, but in restoring the habitat. Nicole is the biologist. I’m just a communications person and an information junkie with a love for nature. Still, we’ve been on a journey to fall in love with a fly and all it represents together. And I think it’s fair to say that the journey has surprised us both.

Michael Viramontes, our stewardship manager has brought Nicole along for the habitat restoration science as he’s researched and implemented, tweaked and sometimes reimagined. He’s taken me along for the stories of what it means to embrace and unlock the mysteries of creatures overlooked.

While he worked toward his DSF survey permit from USFW this summer, guided by another key DSF entomologist, Ken Osborne, it occurred me that he is on Hero’s Journey. Indeed, conservation at its best — in its mentorships, discoveries, challenges and joy — is a Hero’s Journey. Especially the part where we return with the treasure only to find we are called to adventure once more and must start again at the beginning.

Michael, the stewardship team, the community programs team, and hundreds of volunteers have helped to restore trash burdened, invasive plant-choked, root-bound sand into moving dunes. This ocean of sand must be dotted with Colton Dune native plants including islands of California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum), the suspected primary DSF feeding plant, and telegraph weed (Heterotheca grandiflora), the plant associated with egg-laying sites. I’ve been out to collect buckwheat seeds and to help install young seedlings, but the transformation only takes your breath away when you see it from above in this drone video from volunteer Anthony Palafox.

The DSF emerges from the dunes during the hottest days of summer, sipping nectar and finding a mate. It might be that like some other insect species, this nectar is critical to the maturation of eggs. It might be that it’s critical for keeping their strength up in their two weeks of strenuously partying during their swan song, while enjoying their first and only days beneath the sun. Most of the science we know and speculate about is in the most recent information from recovery plan from USFWS. Perhaps someday, a newly-minted entomologist will unlock their mysteries for us. I hope so.

I hope this not just because I’m curious, but because sometimes habitats that support charismatic megafauna are ignored unless detestable microfauna is revered. In 1993 it was estimated that 95% of DSF habitat was eliminated by development and what remained was mostly degraded by disking, irrigation, and dumping. It’s more likely now that only 2 or 3% of the habitat is left.

Rivers & Lands Conservancy holds the largest portion of the remaining preserved habitat, and that habitat provides resources for species that are more likely to quickly catch my eye and my heart like burrowing owls, meadowlarks, and butterflies.

Yet, it’s fair to say that the DSF is in my heart now too. In fact, I think the more manageable way to save the world is to sometimes focus on the small things, the ones that must examined closely to be unlocked whether that’s with a set of colored pencils or with the scientific method.

Save the fly, save the dunes. Save the dunes, save the future. And it’s easier to start with the small things. Small things are deceptively powerful.

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In October and November, the turkey vultures cruise back through my town on their fall migration in great kettles of hundreds of birds. They seem to be a subset of the greater migration that travels through the Mojave in the tens of thousands. I only see them once or twice, but then again, they are strangely easy to miss.

They usually see me first, dropping to tree level to investigate my activities in the front yard with a lazy curiosity. The silent spies eventually give themselves away with a single whooshing sweep of overlarge wings or a gigantic raptorial shadow that startles my attention upward. For a moment, the primeval part of my mind calculates fight or flight. Then I find myself looking into a featherless pink face with inquisitive glossy brown eyes. There is always a tilt of its head as it tries to get a better look, as if like me, it is now admiring and wondering what this fascinating creature is thinking. I always wonder how long they’ve been there, watching.

It confounds me why they find me so interesting, but I know why I feel that way about them. Their wrinkled bald heads extending into a powerful beak are startling and have inspired many a movie monster. Yet, that featherless skull serves them well, making it easier to keep their faces clean and free of bacteria. (Which is necessary if you are going to insert your whole head in a carcass.)

Turkey vultures also have disconcerting habits such as defecating on their bare, scaled legs to cool down and vomiting half-digested carrion as a means of escaping predators. They don’t seem to be the sort of animal you would want to spend much time with and yet they are always surrounded by friends. The truth is they are playful, smart, and social.

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What I love most about the turkey vulture migration, however, is how people react to them. These low-flying dense flocks of vultures seem to go unnoticed by most despite their twice annual appearances. In years past, I was bombarded on Facebook, being tagged in local groups as people worried that there were great flocks of eagles with six-foot wingspans in their yard and warning others to lock up all the pets. If you don’t know turkey vultures, it’s a fair concern. And every fall and spring, I promised others that our vultures have giant harmless chicken feet. Then I shared their disgusting but somehow cool characteristics like a gleeful 12-year-old. Maybe we all have a gleeful 12-year-old inside because this year, I saw someone cheerfully announcing their arrival in neighborhood group.  

I think that it is one of nature’s greatest gifts that there are still things for all of us to newly discover. I must admit, I am jealous of those who have yet to look up at just the right time and find themselves beneath a vulture-stirred sky. It is a true moment of awe no matter how many times you’ve seen it before, but there is nothing like that initial surprise.

The first time I saw the migrating flocks 20 years ago, the world felt so big at that moment, and I wondered how much was still hidden from me. And when I paused to take in the sky for a while, I saw an endless pattern tightening, disintegrating, stretching through seasons and time. It was comforting, not in its majesty, but in its wobbling whimsy.

I keep hoping that the weather in the Pacific Northwest has pushed down one last wave of the migration. Perhaps a few flocks of vultures have dawdled. It seems too late in the fall now for this, but I keep looking up just in case.

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On Thursday morning after the election, I woke up, realized my stomach was unhappy and promptly projectile vomited on the bedroom floor, on the bathroom floor, and eventually in the toilet. I didn’t have a fever. I wasn’t hung over. I just couldn’t process food anymore. I sobbed into porcelain, surrounded by worried dogs and wondered what had just happened to me. I’ve done this at a few brutal but ultimately pivotal times in my life, but I didn’t understand why I was doing it now.

I didn’t follow the election; I voted based on my own research while staying out of media unless it was to look at local media addressing the issue directly from ground zero. And it’s nobody’s business what my politics are unless you’re a close friend and ask. Even better if you are a close friend and we discuss fears, personal challenges, and hopes rather than straight up politics over beers. I’ll spill my guts to you and listen closely while you spill yours, but only then.  

My biggest fear was that no one would win decisively. I believe in women’s autonomy, the rights of all marginalized people, protecting the environment - and I also believe in fiscal responsibility, a strong stock market to ensure the endowments at my land conservancy can support the properties they are earmarked to steward in perpetuity, and in ensuring more than a livable wage for the team members who do that work. No matter what happened in the election, I already knew it wasn’t going to be my ideal scenario. So, I just wanted it to be decisive. I wanted to vote, know the decision, and decide what my next steps were then. In the meantime, I was focused on my own possibilities.

The Saturday before the election, after two weeks of searching and trying, I trapped a beautiful male juvenile red-tailed hawk to be my hunting partner for the next two or three years. As a licensed falconer, I am only allowed to trap a juvenile hawk of select species, the red-tailed hawk included. I have always loved trapping a new hawk in October/November because 80% of juvenile hawks don’t make it in the wild, especially during this time on their first migration. Juvenile hawks whether they understand it or not, aren’t safe. Yet, if I trap a hawk, I know it is, to the best of my ability, going to be safe.

I’ve always wondered what they must think, their wild genes driving them on their first great walk-about only to discover all they do not know and all that might kill them. Often their demise is as simple as not finding enough food. The hawks that are trapped on the bal-chatri traps I use are unharmed as are the mice used as bait and the hawk’s chances of surviving if I take it home increase exponentially. My hawk has health care, a steady and unwavering supply of food, and all the protection I give them beyond their own bad decisions when we hunt together. This year though, the young migrating hawks were doing very well.

I hadn’t seen this many juvenile red-tailed hawks in inland Southern California since 1995. It was a glorious year of rain and flourishing habitat. Most of the young hawks I tried to trap had no interest in the potential of free mice. There have been years when I drove for hundreds of miles just to see one juvenile red-tailed hawk to throw a trap beneath and it was always starving. This year they were on every other pole along the roadway interspersed between peregrine falcons and kestrels. The kestrel population is declining, but I saw so many. It filled my heart with the joy of possibility. I never thought I would see such a rich raptor migration again, but there they were, thriving. We can’t control the weather but have indeed left them spaces to refuel on their first great journey.

I knew the journey of this election and what followed was going to be rough. Yet, I thought I would slide through it with grace and ready to go to battle for whichever of these important facets of my personal belief system went unfulfilled. I already knew I wasn’t going to win what I wanted. I will always think that what happens locally and in my purview to help is more important than my vote. (Although I always vote.)  Yet, I was so sick.

As someone who has family and friends they hold dear on both sides of the voting choices, I didn’t know who to talk to. I didn’t want to share my feelings with anyone who was relieved. I didn’t want to share my feelings with anyone who feared the worst. So, I didn’t. I just watched online as a doubling down on both these views unfolded and the attacks started. You were an idiot or evil depending on which way you voted. And when I dipped my toes in the water to suggest that there were people who had gone in knowing they would be sad and worried no matter who won, I got slammed as if I was far right or far left. And I am neither. Longtime personal friends “othered” me. I understand othering. It’s hard not to to put thought processes you don’t understand into the “other” bucket. It is easy to other or layer your beliefs on another being - even when it could potentially be an amazing friendship of entirely different minds.

I brought my new hawk home and was startled at his weight. Male hawks are much smaller than females and this one was small but somehow weighed as much as a female. As my doctor has loved to describe me, he was obese. This was going to be a challenge because the only thing I had to use for communicating friendship with a hawk was food.

I was going to have to rethink all of my tried and true training techniques to work out a relationship with nothing more than a few small snacks. This hawk had feasted so diligently that it was going to days maybe more than a couple of weeks for him to have any interest in more than a bite of food. In the wild they can go many days without a meal if they are well-fed. So, I tweaked and adjusted things to his comfort, finding he indeed had no interest in food. What he did have was something I’ve never seen before, a stalwart belief that life was easy and there was nothing to fear, including me and the dogs. Within 24 hours he was tame. He loved sitting on the glove, watching the dogs and bathing in his bath pan. Somehow over the last 7 months between hatching and migrating, he had grown up safe. His surety that the world was kind cushioned him like bubble wrap. I wish I had a cushion of bubble wrap.

I have never blocked anyone over politics, but I ended a few decades’ old friendships over the divisive finger-pointing conversations post-election privately offline. Worse, friends of friends piled on to add to vitriol and judgement on my tame comments asking for understanding on my seemingly wish-washy position. I know better than to argue with people online. I just so desperately needed someone to understand what it felt like not to be solidly on either side in this hullabaloo. Again, I should have known better. When I teach writing memoirs, I constantly preach that we should not explain ourselves to the world, but instead explain the world to ourselves. And here I was, explaining myself to the world as if I would somehow get what I wanted. And so, I woke up the next morning and spent two days trying to keep food in my stomach. Then I beat myself up for being a baby about the election. It took me almost a week to realize the true source of my bodily reaction. I was afraid. I was afraid for my emotional, and maybe physical, safety.

I went trapping hawks alone this year, because my apprentice who has deservedly graduated from his apprenticeship was sick and couldn’t come trapping with me. It’s easier with a second person because you have someone else to sling the bal-chatri trap beneath a hawk from the passenger side of the vehicle. This is harder to do from the driver’s side along a roadway. It’s also just more fun to have someone else with you to share the experience in both its highs and frustrations. At least that’s what I tell myself, but there’s a deeper truth. It’s also safer for me.

I went out at 6:30 AM and slow cruised stretches of road along open space on a Saturday morning. I didn’t see many people except for the one dude in a white Honda Civic who pulled alongside me to ask what I was doing while I peered at a hawk through binoculars. I told him I was bird watching in the most soothing “silly me” voice I could muster and hated myself a little for it. My Toyota Tacoma towered over his little passenger car, and I undoubtedly had two more cylinders in my engine, but my response was placating.

He said he was a security guard, but he didn’t look like a security guard. He probably was a security guard but what I did on a public road still was none of his business. I was nowhere near the construction site across the street he inferred he was patrolling. And I wished my apprentice, now friend, Lenzy was with me not for the shared experience but for his full six feet and ability to change the goofy smile he gives me into a glare that would instantly shift the dynamics. I continued smiling and signaling how unthreatening I was, then looked longingly at the hawk I wanted to try to trap and drove on.

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There was a distinct danger to me in the rhetoric following the election and my inability to embrace either side. What I heard both in subtext and in upfront messaging was that if I was sad, I didn’t belong to one group. If I wasn’t sad enough I didn’t belong to other. Humans who do not belong are not safe. The science says this is why we desperately need to belong somewhere. It is why we “other” people.

What I saw was people shredding each other apart with their words as if there could ever be an absolute winner in politics. What I understood in this was that I had friends who I had loved and trusted for years would not support me, respect me, or believe in me if I couldn’t align. So, I felt alone, unprotected, and set up for a fight I would never win.

We are all entrenched in our personal experiences and mine have a long history of my fight for safety. When my parents were unavailable starting when I was five, when my grandmother who was raising me with my grandfather was committed for psychiatric care, when my stalker pulled a gun on my brother, when my boyfriend physically abused me, and when others spun intricate webs of lies that entrapped me and in all instances I looked around and saw no support and no escape.

It wasn’t the election. It wasn’t about who voted for whom. I was puking out my guts because I felt unsafe with no idea how to feel safe again.

I named my hawk “Dio” which will morph into barking “Ronnie James Dio” if I’m irritated. I named him this because the song “Last in Line” came on the radio when I spotted him. The morning was getting late. I was going to need to end my joyous morning of bird watching and tempting hawks soon. The radio cooed “We’re a laugh with a tear, the hope without the fear. We are coming… HOME” and then Ronnie James Dio belted, “We’re off the witch, we may never never never come home” and I flipped a u-turn and prepped my trap.

Dio the hawk wasn’t hungry and I’m not sure why he came down trap and even more so why he chose to take a risk when he didn’t need the food. I don’t take risks unless I feel safe, and I’ve never met a hawk that felt safer in the world. This tumult of a world with habitat disappearing by the minute and manmade structure proliferating wild spaces is a gauntlet that baby hawks fail more than succeed in surviving. I usually meet hawks because they are desperate.

I am learning how to work with a hawk who is fearless and can lean on his vision of a safe world. I may be flummoxed by his choices, but he wasn’t wrong to take the risk. In a few weeks I’ll be setting him off to fly free and to discover how much more success he can have working with a seemingly incompatible team of human, dog, and hawk. We will all have different ideas about how this should work but will ultimately have to compromise to not only succeed but to find greater success than we would have had relying on our own vision of the world.

So, I’m reminding myself that I extricated myself from every situation that has terrorized me, eventually. I am asking myself how to feel as safe as a juvenile hawk who has no business thinking the world is kind.

Nature is more brutal than politics. The hawk was never safe. Yet, nature is the greatest teacher and the most dependable source of comfort. It is where we find we belong, and where we belong we are safe.

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