Invisible Beasts (12 page)

Now, recollect that if you were to see the city inside the earth, you would not see the gladiator spiders or their webs. You would see only the image of a meta-memorial: a memorial to memorials. You would see Theodora's monuments—those alabaster and bronze statues that used to glitter along its avenues—collapsed in violent heaps where the saint's nose is rammed against the cracked breast of Justice, and commanding hands, as heavy as motors, point from under buckled pavements and open expressively out of crushed walls. If you will pardon the comparison, imagine a snow globe with the monuments as its plastic scene and the disconnected bones as snow. It's like that, except that the city doesn't shake anymore, while the bones, secured by natural causes, float forever in place.

3

A
nimals can teach us, and the Foster Fowl was the most extraordinary teacher alive. It hurts to think that I may have had a hand in its disappearance, and when my conscience starts to prick, I go over the whole episode inch by inch . . . all the way up the “escalator to extinction.”

The Foster Fowl

G
O OUT ON A
J
ULY DAY
, when from a high branch a robin pours out its carol like a general blessing, along with a flycatcher's whoop, an oriole's note, and the melody of a song sparrow that springs alike from earth and air. Go out, take a pair of kitchen shears. You can smell the tall milkweeds, with their flowering globes like old-fashioned microphone heads; they're broadcasting a summer special that brings in the bees, bent double with effort, and the monarch butterflies who have mated tipsily in the air and now, female by female, stately orange and black-deckled, land to lay their eggs. Across your path, a hummingbird arches in an inch-long arabesque—with a diminutive roar she chases off a wren, trailing her battle cry:

Squeaksneeterie!

Go to the purple lavender smoking on its naked stems. Respecting the bees, whose business here is more important than yours, cut yourself a bundle, take it home, wash it, cram it into a clean Ball jar, and fill the jar with honey. Seal it tight and take it across the road to your
neighbor's farmhouse. Exchange it for a half-dozen eggs lifted out from under their mamas, still warm, and take them home on a chipped plate that you set on your porch corner, just inside the screen door. And she'll come. Or she would till lately.

You won't see her actually arrive. If the eggs are placed out for her, she'll just be there, like the Beatles song about Mother Mary: “When I offer chocolates, she is standing right in front of me.” Although I misheard that song: “In my hour of darkness” were the correct words, but I always thought that Mother Mary would come when you made her an offering suitable to her place in the natural scheme of things. If you put out a golden box of fine chocolates, like the platform of a Byzantine throne, she would appear, drawn to the odor of your prayer, her blue mantle brushing the lid, her eyes piercingly gentle.

Anyway . . . put the eggs out, and soon, in that humble porch corner, a creature appears like an azure wave from some transparent sea, mantling the eggs and crooning,
cro-coo-roc, cro-coo-roc
. As you recover from her stunning plumage—peacock, aqua, lacustrine—you see that she's rather comical. Her build is between a pheasant and a small wild turkey. Her neck is a lapis pipe; she fixes on you a gaze the color of pineapple meat; her short, curved, turquoise beak resembles nothing so much as a pair of plastic-coated sewing scissors. She has no hard feathers, but is entirely covered in iridescent down—a silken mop, a turkey shawled in sapphire threads, and over her head droops a crest like
an unraveled pompon. And she's as soft inside as out: she can't resist a clutch of foundling eggs. But unlike any other mother bird, she won't defend her nest.

So begin the game: steal her eggs, her newly adopted chicken children, by scattering corn outside. She'll unseat herself like a shimmering cloud, rise on indigo stilts, bend her long feet as if inserting them into high-heeled pumps, and quickly tiptoe out the door to graze, for she's very hungry. When your Foster Fowl returns to find her eggs in your hands, she doesn't rush you screaming or stab her blue beak in your blood. Instead she glides to the trees bordering your yard, teeters there, a silvery teardrop, and melts away into the forest. Now, now she is your quarry to be pursued with eager questions. How many species, and which, will the Foster Fowl incubate? How many avian species owe a boost, and how many abandoned broods owe their success, to a mother whose all-enfolding love does not discriminate between her kind and others?

I
LIVE NEAR A SPOT
known as the Warbler Capital of the World. In spring, bird fanciers from all over converge here, on a boardwalk surrounded by marshes, to jostle fiercely for position, sometimes even erecting their camera tripods over the heads of other birders who have knelt down to peer into the brush, binoculars at the ready, oblivious. Complete strangers, standing cheek by jowl, exchange intelligence on the likeliest location of the blue-headed
vireo or the ruby-crowned kinglet. Men dressed like hunters tote weapon-sized lenses; old couples bicker in soft voices over their lists of “life birds”—a life bird is one that you see for the very first time. Ten years ago, it didn't occur to me that the first Foster Fowl to visit my porch—my own life bird, whom I nicknamed “My Blue Heaven”—was anything but an accidental. Something soars overhead looking for Nova Scotia: that's an accidental. But My Blue Heaven wasn't, after all, an accidental: she hadn't gone out of her way at all. She was a harbinger.

I'd discovered My Blue Heaven brooding a plateful of new eggs I'd laid down momentarily, and the game came about by accident. When she fled into the woods, I decided to track her. Since she was obviously flightless, the best method was to seek the nests of birds that laid their eggs on the ground, and might attract her. While consulting Peterson's long list of these, I noticed something curious: many birds were shifting their ranges northward. I should have thought! Birds as different as the tiny blue-gray gnatcatcher and the lumbering turkey vulture were moving northward. Why didn't I put two and two together? What was I thinking?

I ought, I ought to have wondered what a blatantly southern bird like My Blue Heaven, with her morpho butterfly looks and her uselessness for winter, was doing near Lake Erie. She must have walked, maybe all the way from Florida. And after her, I saw only females (except, memorably, once). Why? Why didn't I mull it over? Because I
was stupid. Because I was having too much fun, finding out which eggs the Foster Fowls mothered, as if nature had developed a new summer sport for my benefit.
All for me
, I gloated, setting the lure of the orphan eggs, sprinkling the trail of corn, and finding the world's most beautiful blues in a downy cloud.
All for me
, the thrill of tracking. How many of us are philosophical enough to question the whys and wherefores of a pleasure? I wasn't, as I hot-footed it into the summer woods.
All for me
. Imbecile.

T
O FIND A
F
OSTER
F
OWL
in the greenwood wasn't easy, because only in pursuit of a blue creature does one appreciate how much blue there is in green. Where eyes failed I tried ears, parting the brush between trees, listening.
Phew!
called the veeries back and forth, and
Freebie! freebie!
screamed the phoebe, and
Truly to thee
, sang the bluebirds, and the killdeer, whose species is
Vociferus
, was, and
Wheat, wheat, wheat to you
, sang a cardinal whose babies shrilled
Feed-me-feed-me-feed-me-feed-me
. I went to the marsh around my pond, and spent hours crouched under tickling grasses, binoculars glued to my eye sockets. The pond, at the bottom of a quarry, continuously reflected a quivering, linear, blue light that caressed the stone walls, and where the walls met the water stood cattails and reeds. That's where I found My Blue Heaven. For weeks, I studied the volitional shimmer that gave her away, that wasn't sky or water or light, but a maternal breast. I grew very curious,
because no pheasant can swim like a duck . . . but when the time came, there it was: a bobbing chain of ducklings, dabbling, shaking their baby rumps, in the ripples and on the sand beside My Blue Heaven's hiding place.

In later years, I followed my egg-deprived Foster Fowls to the nests of mute swans, Canada geese, woodcocks, whippoorwills, bobwhites, and once, a kingfisher, and never discovered how they did it—how they taught the young of other species. But somehow, they did.

In those years, I could count on three or four Foster Fowls in a summer. I never saw their chicks: not one blue puffball, and I wondered (though not enough
^*
). Where were their mates? A pheasant female wandering, all alone, in search of abandoned eggs—why didn't this bother me more? Such birds live in harems with a territorial male. Nature doesn't make roving bachelor hens. Of course, invisible animals can be very different from their visible counterparts, but it was still odd. I knew that My Blue Heaven was an invisible bird because I'd tried to photograph her, but the pictures showed only an assortment of ducks, swans, geese, woodcocks, and other ordinary birds.
For some reason, invisible animals do not show up on camera. It is a great handicap to amateur naturalists of invisible wildlife, like myself, and it is a great pity. Especially considering what ultimately happened.

One day, I found my royal cloud sitting in a dent in the grass, barely a nest, on a clutch of creamy eggs that I glimpsed when she rose to turn them with her deft turquoise beak. I stared till my eyes watered, in the shadows where a pebbled sort of whistle announced a single, obsessed cricket.

“You crazy girl,” I thought, “you insane bird. This, I have got to see.”

And I did see, soon afterward—on my computer screen, as I scanned the photographs taken by my infrared camera. These pictures explained why the Foster Fowl needs to be invisible. Otherwise, she'd be a meal for the young owl caught—wings perpendicular between tree trunks—clutching a limp cardinal. How had she reared this raptor, whose habits were the cruel opposite of her own? How mysterious was the being that I hunted through summer after summer, her loving kindness as abundant as the air. My instincts became honed to clues I was not conscious of—hunches of the feet, guesses of the inner compass—that led me into ever deeper concealments, obscurer hiding places. I gagged at the sapphire on a ripe, torn corpse, crooning her cradle song as if a vulture's nest were purest myrrh . . .

T
EN YEARS AGO
, I saw my last Foster Fowl. It was an August morning. The bells, rattles, and whistles in the insect world rose into a sky stuffed with pale flames.
Thwock!
A walnut smacked the turf, just missing my skull. Hello, gravity and time. I felt suddenly fed up with gravity and time and their boring threats; I felt put upon by natural law, and went into the woods swinging a long stick to sweep away the spiderwebs that I really had no business to ravage, given how excellent an animal a spider is. With that arrogance of ours, like some pompous bureaucrat in a Byzantine procession, I marched through the woods swaying my stick in front of me, tearing down what I couldn't see and didn't want to. I marched into a stand of oaks about four inches high. Each green shoot spread a top cluster of five large leaves, like a puppy's big paws. A stand of mighty oaks was trying to grow up here. Then I saw my Foster Fowl, in the spattered light. Her neck was sunk in her breast, while her candy-yellow eyes, swiveling toward me, registered broodiness, the mother love that belongs so completely to birds. (Only domestic hens are unmotherly, because we've bred it out of them.) Her throat inflated as she crooned. She looked as if a valve had opened beneath her nest, inside the earth where it was still a molten star, and was shooting a warm ray through her heart. After a while, she cranked up on her indigo stilts, shook out her wings, and went pecking among the
infant oaks. I fiddled with the focus adjustment and heard my own voice, spontaneous as any birdcall: