For five months, I missed the fact of my own pregnancy. Yet I do not believe this was entirely my fault. Many of the traditional signs of the condition eluded me altogether — nausea, tender breasts, acne. The symptoms I did experience were hardly definitive. There was a plausible justification for each one.
In short, I do not think I am to blame. I do not think I am insane. I simply did not understand my own nature. Not until now.
The body and the mind are meant to be woven together: thought into emotion into sensation into senses into flesh. But for most of my life I have been rootless, unmoored, a ghost. All thought, no physicality. I have been a person made of artistic sensibility and grief. I have imagined that my mind is paramount, my body secondary — the former an intricate instrument, the latter only a vehicle. My flesh has not factored into my identity. The subtle clues of the physical transformation of pregnancy were lost on me. The weight gain, the hot flashes — these things might have been happening to someone else. The hunger and exhaustion were dim and distant.
I was only able to see myself clearly, at last, through a lens. If I had not stepped onto the side of the camera where animals live — where nature flourishes in all its strangeness and glory — I might never have discovered my own reality.
What is your nature, Miranda?
I do not feel the need to write to you as often. Not anymore. I do not feel a desire to take photographs either. It has been weeks since I ventured across Southeast Farallon with a camera in my hand. At the moment, I have no interest in the life of the mind. Ideas, field of vision, light, death, beauty, ghosts, imagination, shadows, love — these are little things. Unimportant things.
For the past five months, without my knowledge or consent, my body has created a brand new living thing. While my mind was focused on images, and tragedy, and letter-writing, my body has been engaged in miracles.
These new thoughts arrived at the same time as the birds.
THERE IS NO describing Bird Season, not really. In the whole world, there are fifty thousand western gulls. Right now, more than half of that number are here on Southeast Farallon — most of them directly outside my window. And it doesn’t stop there. There is a great murre city tucked behind a high hill. In order to see it, you have to scale the rock face and look down from above. The murres are lovely creatures, finely sculpted. They have the tuxedo coloring of penguins — black backs, white bellies — but penguins can be comical, whereas the murres are nothing short of elegant. Above their rookery, Lucy has built a blind, inside which she can crouch. She scavenged the wood and metal from the coast guard house. She even brought up a couple of kitchen chairs from our cabin. There are a hundred thousand birds in the murre colony. In addition, there are forty thousand auklets on the islands. Twenty thousand cormorants. Four thousand pigeon guillemots.
This information is not news to me. I’ve been hearing about it for weeks from an overexcited Lucy, who looks forward to Bird Season each year like a small child waiting for Christmas. (With the arrival of her beloved avians, she has all but forgotten about her missing pet. The octopus’s tank was emptied and put away without much comment.) I have been aware that the islands will be home, throughout the spring and summer, to a phenomenal host of birds. Still, my expectations were ludicrously inadequate. I imagined that the scene would be something like a peace rally: a throng of feathery bodies cohabiting genially, swapping egg-laying tips and gossip in warbles and chirps. I envisaged a sea of nests packed together like tents at a campground.
The reality has proven to be very different. I’m not sure that anything could have prepared me, but my naïveté certainly didn’t help.
The islands are now white. The birds have stained the stones pale with their guano. Saddle Rock, which I can see from my bedroom window, looks like an ice floe bobbing in the water. The trees are coated with slime. The stench is overpowering, the breeze hung with curtains of ammonia. The air itself is toxic.
Then there is the noise. As long as the birds are awake, they are screaming. A mating pair will holler back and forth for hours. Lucy says that the gulls are communicating, coordinating important matters like who should hunt and who should sit on the eggs — but to me it sounds like some kind of otherworldly battle cry. They shout to tell predators that they are guarding their territory. They shriek some manic version of a lullaby at their own eggs. Each pair of gulls spends most of the day wailing. There are thousands of pairs on Southeast Farallon.
Our routine has changed, as you can imagine. Our presence here is unnatural at the best of times, and we always have to be careful. But during Bird Season, even the smallest of actions can have devastating consequences. At night, I have been told in no uncertain terms to be careful which lights I use. Several of the avian species are nocturnal. By flicking on the overhead bulb in my bedroom, I would be shining a spotlight on their shadowy forms, telling predators where to find them. Instead, I must now use a paltry reading lamp. In the daytime, our movements have been restricted to specific pathways carved through the crush of nests. Every square inch of rock seems to have been claimed. One wrong movement could result in a crunch, an egg oozing its contents onto the grass. Just observe, don’t interfere — that has always been our mantra. It is a hard rule to obey during the present chaos and clamor.
There is also a new uniform to be worn on the grounds. Flea collars around the ankles (to fend off the bird lice). A mask over the mouth and nose (to ward off the smell). Thick leather gloves (to repel slashing beaks). And a hard hat, of all things (more on this later). It’s also sensible to put on a poncho, since the birds will use any method in the book to combat a perceived threat. They will void their bowels with the gusto and precision of bomber jets.
Lucy is now the undisputed queen of the islands. Each morning, she barks out orders, and we all jump to obey. A thousand things have to be done. For thirty years, people have been studying the seabirds here. This legacy is not to be trifled with. Lucy visits the murre blind every day. But there are also the storm-petrels, which have to be banded, despite the fact that they are nocturnal fliers and avian acrobats. Lucy has been staying up until two in the morning, lurking on the cliff edge and holding out a fine mesh net, trying to nab these deft fliers in midair. Bag and tag. Catch and release. Observe and record. The rhinoceros auklets must be tallied, too, which means that Galen and Forest can be found along the shore in the afternoons, shoving their hands into burrows and grabbing out indignant birds. The puffins, meanwhile, have beaks that are shaped like wire cutters and could, in a pinch, be used as such. In the wrong mood, they are quite capable of lopping off a finger.
But the gulls are the worst of all. They kill for food. They kill for pleasure. They kill for no good reason. They are expert assassins. They soar around the islands with bloody beaks and a mad glint in their eyes. It took me a while to discover what Lucy meant when she wrote P.I.H. in the daily log. This stands for “pecked in head,” the gulls’ special method of dispatch. Six chicks dead, found P.I.H. at Rhino Catacombs. Southeast Farallon is littered with little corpses. Broken wings and caved-in skulls are common, the remains of murres and puffins covered in maggots and the juice of gull regurgitation. Downy infants, newly hatched, nestle alongside decomposing carcasses. It is a dreadful sight. This is why the auklets and storm-petrels are nocturnal — and why they dig burrows rather than building nests. In daylight, in the open, they would not stand a chance against the killing machine of twenty-five thousand gulls.