He hated birds. Well, he didn’t like them. Jane was always telling him he shouldn’t hate things, unless they were a special kind of rotten, and even then, it wasn’t right to feel that much anger at a person or a thing or a place you’ve been. Still, he was fed up with all the flapping and squawking and the feeding they had to do for animals that never really felt like they had a soul.  Why couldn’t she love monkeys or raccoons or even goats?

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It had originally been kind of charming, being with this bird lady. He remembered the time in the zoo lobby when she had reached to shake his hand, only to reveal a bright green African parrot perched nearly on her skin. She had short, spiky hair that jutted from above those perfectly circular glasses that John Lennon wore. 

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He had been sitting in a dry savannah for the past seven and a half hours, and the sun was beginning to set. A swath of hornets circled the nest within the hollow log near the edge of the pond he’d been staking out. He waited a half hour longer, staring out at the tall grass, before packing up his things and trudging back to camp. No luck today. 

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He was on the hunt to confirm a sighting of a rare Horn-beaked Redtail. It was rumored to have migrated here several months ago, at least that’s what someone on the forums had said. Long, thin tail feathers, a short protruding painted beak, a streak of yellow behind both black beady eyes, all wrapped in a shroud of deep crimson.  

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He’d been coming back to this pond for three weeks, sitting among the creatures of the day and night. The silence never bothered him these days, but he used to fidget when things came to a hush — the vacuum of quiet ringing in his ears. But now, years later, he had come to relish the silence. It was reassuring, he thought, to know that things could be turned off, put on pause for a while. 

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Wind became an ally, gently whistling to ears that the earth was here and always whirling, ever so slowly, even in the dark of space. Everything grew meaning out here in the humanless, machineless, open adventure. 

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He had come to regard silence as a friend now. There had been, in the days leading up to her final days, moments of quiet understanding between he and his wife. Only eyes and lip curls and nods and fingertips. A soft, sacred, speechless language. 

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He hated to think of those hours in the flat, pale glow of hospital rooms, but he hated it more that he shouldn’t and couldn’t hate those thoughts. They were the last and only things he could cling on to, desperately and hopelessly, but thankful for the morsel of memory before she was taken away into nothing, or something. 

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He was almost out of food. He had gone into the nearest town to gather some dried meats, water purification tablets, and coffee, but that was over four days ago. He dreaded every time he had to slump back into the store, the town where everybody knew that the old man was here, but not sure what he was up to. He had been forced into several mumbling matches with local cashiers and farmers who stared pitifully at his ragged clothes and muddy boots. Maybe they thought he was homeless, travelling the countryside looking for shelter. It didn’t matter what they thought, truth be told. He wasn’t doing this for them, or anyone else. This was for Jane. 

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He bought a few cans of beans, several pounds of meats—freeze-dried jerky,  bacon, sausage—nuts, seeds, apples and oranges, a pack of batteries, fresh socks and sunscreen. The young man behind the counter, a chubby, half-bearded dead-eyed clerk, asked if he’d been in town long. 

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“Three weeks,” he said as the man bagged up his items. He couldn’t make out what the clerk asked next, the tiny store bell ringing suddenly above the door on his way out. 

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People seemed strange to him now, like they were all in on some project that had nothing to do with him anymore. There had been a time, his whole life before, when he felt connected, living and smiling and struggling alongside his fellow man. He had been an engineer, designing systems and structures that made society what it was. He had been an amateur botanist, well he had become one as Jane’s relentless passion for the wild bloomed within and upon him. “Never stop growing,” they had always said, “that’s what mattered.” 

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Jane was an ornithologist at the University of Michigan and then a field researcher for the National Wildlife Foundation. She had published two books, 36 research papers, and had been featured in a handful of nature documentaries. Always looking up, always squinting at something in the trees. 

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Her love for birds went beyond academia and science, and right into their home. Her first bird was a Cebu Flowerpecker named Harriet. This was before they built the aviary, and the birds would hop around and flutter through the house. He laughed about it now, but when they moved in with each other, he’d been furious. He’d find droppings in his shoes, in the toaster, and in the seats of chairs. They would follow Jane into the shower, chirping and dancing on the curtain rod while she hummed in the mist.

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She was a vegetarian, an adventurer and lover of the world. She was everything he wasn’t and everything he wanted, all in one. How does a person make you feel that way? Like you’ve been doing it all wrong. Like they’ve stolen something, some former way of life and thinking, right from the back of your skull?

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When they first met, he’d seen her as some sort of retired yoga teacher or one of those people in a yogurt commercial. She was thin, older, with deep laugh lines jutting from her eyes — deeply bright green, as if illuminated from within. He always thought of them like a sunrise in the jungle, that elemental glow. 

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She was cleaning out the birdcages in an exhibit he was working on at the zoo. They were never introduced, but he became fixated on her while on a walkthrough with the architects. She fluttered off into the foliage, humming to herself, oblivious to his curiosity beaming through the metal bars. 

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He arrived back at his campsite several hours later, carefully winding his way through crackling brush. There was a pleasant breeze flowing through the tall grass today. He had noticed several semi-rare species of plants that grew here, so he stopped to admire them. 

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Gold-thorned Willowicks with their long, slender arches of wiry, hair-like outer branches. He held them in his hands, smelling the tiny crystalline leaves, mulling the fibrous connective tissue that linked them together, slowly pulling and pushing energy back and forth through the cold, wet earth beneath. He never took samples anymore. He liked the idea of plants having their own lives, that we shouldn’t get to uproot them. We should walk amongst them, admire them, and leave them to grow peacefully together, apart. 

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He lay on his back, inside the thin walls of his tent that night, he closed his eyes to the rhythmic chirping, humming, mechanical groans and calls of the creatures all around him. He clutched Jane’s thick old book to his chest. It was full of over a thousand bird species, their Latin roots, family, genus, phylum, mating habits, calls, heights and weights, migration patterns, predators and diets. The book was warm. The margins were filled with notes and sightings and sketches. It was a thick volume of tattered old pages, thinned out from too many page turns, dog ears and finger licks. There were beautiful sketches of hundreds of rare birds. The Spix’s Macaw, Blue-eyed Ground-Dove and the Antioquia Brushfinch. Pages and pages of feathers, beaks, talons, tails, wings, eyes and every imaginable fact, sighting, pattern. A lifetime of work. She had spent decades studying, travelling, watching, her eyes dancing with wings and trees and layers of golden green. He gripped it tightly, giving it its daily squeeze before bed. 

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Tomorrow continued the pursuit of the final undiscovered piece of the puzzle. She had told him about it a year before she died. “The last, unfindable bird in the southern hemisphere,” she had called it. She would lay on the chair, her feet up on the arm, her glasses in her mouth. “The impossible little devil.”

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She was coming home from work when her body began to show signs of failing her. First, a pang in the gut, like a bad meal. Then, a collapse in the grocery store and a trip to the ER and a man named Stephen showing her something on a screen and those words you can’t forget and a date that can’t be real. Just like that.

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He hadn’t gone through her things until a few months after her death, mainly because that felt private. Is privacy still afforded to someone when they die? He wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to risk it. Maybe the birds would judge him. He had sorted through her clothes and knick-knacks and heirlooms, but there wasn’t anyone to pass them down to. They were just there, in the house, belonging to no one.

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He woke with the sun. Unzipping his dew-drenched tent flap, he crawled out to stretch and greet the new and bright. The grass and dirt and leaves dripped with soggy dew. Small birds flecked the grey-blue sky. He gathered a bit of food, his binoculars and adorned his wide-brimmed bucket hat, then set out into the tall grass toward the pond. 

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He pulled out the fold-out chair he’d stuffed inside a nearby log, plopped into the seat, and zipped up his dark camouflage jacket. He gingerly opened Jane’s book, licked his fingertips and turned through to find his earmarked page. He read through the same words he’d been whispering to himself for weeks now: 

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“A reclusive species, the Horn-beaked Redtail travels alone and conserves resources in its hiding spaces, often going weeks without water. Rare sightings have often been associated with watering holes in cold, swampy climates.”

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Just then, a series of soft, sudden chirps, echoed from the water’s edge. He raised his head slowly, his breath billowing in the cold morning air, afraid to look, afraid to see.