In a time and place where all eyes are on the future, fixated on fears of what-is-to-come and what’s-in-it-for-me, a Black-capped Chickadee lands on a branch of a cottonwood tree. The tree lives beside a meandering river in a deep, desert canyon. It searches the atmosphere with twiggy dendrites as brittle and hollow as the chickadee’s bones, waiting for monsoon rains that will never come. Three more tamarisk-obscured cottonwood trunks stand behind it in a tidy line, their bronchi leaning into a static wave over a long-forgotten irrigation ditch. Nearby, remnants of last year’s precipitation filter deeper into the Entrada Sandstone cliffs, slithering downward between quartz grains into a bedrock labyrinth, while ancient water exits from alcove seeps below.

The Black-capped Chickadee—who hatched last spring—is still composing a proper winter song amid the chips and trills of foraging Dark-eyed Juncos below. She scales the corrugated trusses of cottonwood bark with leather toes and keratin claws, surgically plunging her beak towards anything of interest. Having discovered something in one wooden crevasse, she is airborne with a beakful of grub and an undulating flight, like a raft through a rapid, sweeping upward to crest each wave, and dropping into an acceleration for the next. The chickadee lands upside-down on the next trunk with a hop, head tilt, and feather-fluffing shutter. After one precise movement, a nondescript pocket of bark now contains a meal for later.

Soon, this landscape’s slowness will be obsolete. But there is a truth that all wild things know, and humans were the first to forget.



Aug 30, 2019

The desert. A raw, wondrous place with fragile secrets swirling in eddies, sprouting from nooks in cryptobiotic crust, and waiting to wake up the hairs on the back of my neck. After several summers of commercial river guiding through the deep canyons of the Colorado Plateau, I’ve decided to stay for the changing season, experiencing this familiar and beloved place in a new way. Even the summers have begun to feel different each year, with erratic monsoons or none at all. Maybe the desert's fall will reveal the secrets that we need to know to save it.

For the next two months, I will help capture, count, and band over 500 birds at a remote research station twenty miles northeast of Moab, Utah. It will be a crash course in their anatomy, ecology, and behavior, as my knowledge is still elementary compared to even the humblest birders. But I do know one thing for sure: it is an enlightening privilege to hold a wild bird, a feathered enigma, and begin to sense its story.



Sept 13

Our day begins before sunrise. Stars begin to dissipate, while pink-bottomed clouds blossom from the V of merging canyon walls. Our team of three walks into the tamarisk thicket for our morning’s unspoken ceremony: Net Opening.

As thin, elastic, and indetectable as a spider web, a “mist net” is spread over a raft’s length between two oar-high poles. I can’t blame myself for measuring in river gear when the audible current perpetually lures me downstream. But for now, a net is a great reminder to stay put. Mesh holes are designed to be about the size of a songbird’s head, and pockets the depth of a songbird’s body. Yet, avifauna display endless forms of entanglement, and a manner of other creatures find their way in too: dragonflies, turkeys, cottonwood leaves, and nearly every species of zippers and buttons.



Sept 24

Every half hour, we disperse along the trail to check sixteen nets for captured birds, walkie-talkie-ing news and no-news to the others. “Eight and nine are clear,” I say, beginning on the second half of the trail. “Bleep!” says the black plastic box. “Bleep,” echoes the canyon wall as it hangs over the riverbend.

“One through three are clear,” buzzes the other team. On the first net run, birds and humans are experiencing the same metabolic wake-up call. The morning chill fuels liveliness. Bold Yellow-breasted Chats sift through the dense vegetation mewing, rattling, and squawking. They fly into a net and get more tangled with each burly escape attempt. “Two birds in ten,” I radio before kneeling into the sand. First, I work the net around the bird’s toes as if I were crocheting. Then, I gently slide the bird’s wing and head the rest of the way out. The whole process is calm and focused, even when one oozes warm, oily liquid onto my knuckles, and the other pinches my finger’s skin with its beak. Each bird goes into its own cotton sack, which I carry back to the station with a similar attentiveness—but none of the disgust—of two doggy poop bags. Poop is also heavier, which is why the birds have left theirs on me.

Back at the station, the first chat’s tarsus is quickly adorned with aluminum bling. That is to say, I choose a properly sized band, stamped with a unique, nine-digit identication code, and close it around the bird’s leg with a pair of pliers. I bring the chat four inches from my face and blow apart the feathers from its chin to its flanks, then its nape to its rump, and finally under its wings. What probably feels like a lukewarm hair dryer in all of the wrong places, is an assessment of body plumage, molting feathers, and body fat. Then, I conduct a wing length measurement, pluck a feather sample into a labeled envelope, and funnel the bird upside down into a duct-tape reinforced toilet paper tube from which to measure its weight.

After this treatment of measurements is added to the spreadsheet, I release my grip, and he flies away. Our station’s data is part of a study to track migratory bird densities across wet vs. dry years, or—as we’ve seen lately—dry vs. drier years. But if someone happens to find him again, plump at a birdfeeder or smeared across an airport runway, we’ll learn something more about his story.



Oct 9

On less eventful net runs, I dart across cheat grass swaths like a child in a capture-the-flag game. I spend sinful amounts of my scientific time away from the data sheets, admiring an ant hill’s growing architecture and sketching different patterns of beetle tracks in the sand. The routinely hiked trail has lithified into slickrock before my eyes, and I’ll wear it back to sand again tomorrow. Of course I’ve learned a lot about birds this season, but I know the insects, weather, trees, and river like a favorite poem—memorized, and ever-changing. I think the birds know these things too; so in a way, I’ve learned more about the birds from walking in circles all day than my many bird-in-the-hand experiences.



Oct 26

Between net runs, I spot a Black-capped Chickadee flying into the cottonwoods. The bird imbues a hidden world with purpose as it caches each treasure. I slip into daydreams about its life, immersed in the deepest secrets of the canyon. There is no way to comprehend what the Black-capped Chickadee is knowing at this moment, but it’s certainly lost the second it flies into net #9.

The Black-capped Chickadee is one of the most familiar, well-studied, and widespread species in North America, yet the population’s southern boundary begins to evaporate throughout Utah. They are mostly residential, non-migratory birds, but observers can witness hatch-years dispersing each fall, following inefficient, but bountiful, routes through the Colorado Plateau’s riparian corridors. They are resourceful, rugged birds, adapted to a variety of habitats from the center of remote forests to the middle of suburbia. But most often, Black-capped Chickadees reside along the edges. They harvest and cache their future meal here, along the margins of willow thickets and cottonwood groves.

Autumn is a vital time for caching, when a Black-capped Chickadee prepares for winter food shortages. Their brains have a proportionately larger hippocampus than others in its family, which recruits more neurons during this season of gathering. These characteristics contribute to a remarkable spatial memory, an enduring map of survival based on the landscape and a solar compass.

During the daylight hours, the chickadee is famous for its vocalizations. Their distinctive, complex combinations of fee-bees, chick-a-dees, tseets, tsleets, sees, zees, twitters, gargles, snarls, and squawks, have been likened to human language. Their most famous vocalization, the full chick-a-dee phrase, is used to find others, indicate food sources, warn everyone of predators (the more dees, the more of a threat) and serve as a universal “come here” call.

The forthcoming chore of returning to civilized life tugs at my previously effortless contentment. Wedging myself into a mass movement of flying magnets has certainly helped reorient my own direction in life, but I still don’t feel ready to move on. The secrets of this place feel caught on the tip of my tongue, still out of reach. In between the final net-runs, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight.” When a young girl’s plane crashes in the desert, reality becomes twisted, and she is adopted by wild animals. Ultimately, she decides to venture back to the human realm, guided by a chickadee, “black-capped, light-winged.” Today is the day that Chickadee tells me to “come here,” showing the way back to a fraught world beyond the research station, a world desperately in need of stories.

Navigating through the thick coyote willow, I finally reach the tiny bundle of tempestuous black and white feathers hanging upside down in the net. Its shiny black bill, smaller than a Green River watermelon seed, strikes up at the elastic mesh that holds its feet. My face is six inches away from the agitated bird when I notice something different. While most birds carry a bouquet of rabbitbrush dust on their wings, I smell the perfume of pines. After I untangle the chickadee, it rests its gray nape against the gentle curve of my palm. I immerse my nostrils in its weightless breast feathers. A warm aroma of ponderosa pine softly tickles my cheeks. The bird carries more than seeds, data points, and harsh scorn for intruders. An ambassador of forests, the Black-capped Chickadee has arrived with an air of coming home, a waft through the canyon’s desert doorway of freshly sun-baked butterscotch. Most moments of sensual observation are the simplest form of presence, but now, I am in two places at once. Fragile me, held at my shoulders by sandstone cliffs like the bird in my cold, aching fingers. The grip is only enough to be a gentle reminder of stillness. Meanwhile, the olfactory bliss takes me to another place and time—the bird’s recent visit to a sub-alpine forest.

I am not, nor have I been, a bird bander this season. I have been a little girl whose plane crashed in the middle of the desert. In the aftermath, I’m found by talking lizards and bighorn sheep, raised by beavers, and fed by bears. It is the chickadee, in the end, who arrives with a twig dripping with sappy pine-scent that reminds me of my way back home. Years pass as I live a routine life. But everytime I see a Black-capped Chickadee, I recall a scent, a desert’s balance amiss, and a lesson: the key to nature’s secrets is through imagination and stories.

Only seconds have passed, but it’s time to return to the station to band, measure, and release. For one last moment the bird and I are here, somewhere between a story to tell and a place to be.