As the Skimmer moved up the channel, we were able to approach other cranes close enough to hear them crunching on blue crabs, the staple of their winter diet. We saw a pair doing the prancing, graceful, semiairborne dance that gets them sexually excited. Following the lead of my fellow passengers, I took out my camera and dutifully snapped some pictures. But all of a sudden — it might have been my having reached the empty plateau of four hundred species — I felt weary of birds and birding. For the moment at least, I was ready to be home in New York again, home among my kind. Every happy day with the Californian made the dimensions of our future losses a little more grievous, every good hour sharpened my sadness at how fast our lives were going, how rapidly death was coming out to meet us, but I still couldn’t wait to see her: to set down my bags inside the door, to go and find her in her study, where she would probably be chipping away at her interminable e-mail queue, and to hear her say, as she always said when I came home, “So? What did you see?”
Acknowledgments
The author is especially grateful to Kathy Chetkovich, Chris Connery, Chris Davis, Nicky Dawidoff, Henry Finder, Jonathan Galassi, Chip Jahn, Gayle Morley-Jahn, Bob Mutton, David Remnick, Kate Siebert, Bill Symes, Elisabeth Weinmann, the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the many generous and forgiving alumni of Fellowship and DIOTI. “My Bird Problem” was first published as an essay in The New Yorker, as were portions of three other chapters.