(Selected from the field guide left on your nightstand)
Common Raven:
Your favorite bird. There was a big one that lived in the hospital courtyard and, on your good days, I’d take you out to see it. When I said I thought it was actually a crow, you said very matter-of-factly that it was far too big to be a crow—like me mixing up crows and ravens hadn’t been an inside joke for most of our marriage. It was good to laugh again.
When you got too sick to go outside, you put your wedding band on the sill hoping the bird would come visit. Ravens like shiny things, you said. I said I still thought it was a crow. You smiled and told me crows also liked shiny things.
I set my own wedding band down next to yours while you were sleeping. Maybe two shiny things would call that many more ravens to your window.
The Clapper Rail:
Because it was a sub-species, then its own species, then a sub-species again. Like you, its environment was ruined, and it held on as long as it could—where else was it supposed to go? The marshes dried up.
Your hometown’s water was toxic—your parents couldn’t afford to move.
Piping Plover:
Went extinct in the early 21st century despite conservation efforts, but sightings continue to this day. Most are likely the result of different shorebirds and people with hope meeting on lonely beaches.
New Carolina Parakeet:
A joke bird, named by the internet when they finally decided birds were, in fact, real. It’s an introduced species, or maybe a few species people aren’t bothering to differentiate that have spread north of Florida. They’re not real Carolina Parakeets.
Remember in undergrad when we kept running into each other after our 8AM discussion sections? Remember when that turned into coffee? Not the real stuff, that’s too rare and expensive these days for broke college students, but the diluted “coffee flavored” stuff that’s so syrupy it sticks in your mouth for hours after drinking it.
Sometimes, you settle for the fake stuff.
Saltmarsh Sparrow:
It’s always the ones in the marshes, isn’t it? Like it’s always the poor towns in rural areas with space to spare. It’s the places where the people they don’t care about get pushed/the places where people are forgotten.
The land under the marsh is more valuable than all the life on top of it.
The plastics and chemicals company killing your hometown is more profitable.
Ruffed Grouse:
What’s in a photo? Brown, non-descript, just another bird in the underbrush. Then you see the photos of the male’s mating display: wings flared, tail wide, neck rough black and shining, drumming like a failing heart.
Photos of you on the news: dying in a hospital bed but still smiling. I preferred the photos I snapped of you before, when you wouldn’t even look at the camera. When we were out in the woods looking for birds, and your eyes scanned the trees for the source of some far-off, chortled song.
The ruffed grouse is extinct in most of its former range, but it’s a shy bird. Maybe it’s still there, and we just don’t see it.
Kirtland’s Warbler:
A success story, brought back from the brink like I thought you might be.
You beat the cancer as a kid. You escaped the poor town. You were a professor, a specialist. You were tenured. You were an activist. You’d spoken before Congress about your hometown—not that they listened. You’d beaten the cancer before. Why couldn’t you beat it again?
Bobwhite Quail:
Did you know there is a population of these still living in Italy? You probably knew that. They’re not even supposed to be there, but they are. I like to think you’re also still living somewhere else, even though you’re supposed to be here with me. If I think hard enough about it before I fall asleep at night (when I manage to fall asleep), maybe I’ll wake up where and when you are.
Maybe with the success of the meadow conservation project, they’ll reintroduce Bobwhites to the eastern US.
You would have liked that.
Klee’s Most-Eastern Meadowlark:
A subspecies, lost. Is one loss worth it, if it spurs on change? The vanishing of Klee’s Most-Eastern Meadowlark galvanized a large-scale conservation push of eastern meadow habitats. Now the Meadowlark itself seems safe. A bill named after you works its way through Congress. It’s going to make it easier for communities to fight companies that pump toxic waste all over them. Your mother texted to tell me they’re shutting the chemicals plant down.
But the song specific to the Klee’s subspecies is gone forever like your own off-key singing and the way you badly mimicked bird calls.
American Crow:
You always laughed because I couldn’t tell the difference between a crow and a raven. I leaned into it, till you thought I was playing. But you know what? I really can’t tell the difference between them to this damned day. But I knew you made friends with the big black birds that lived in the trees behind our house. You’d give them peanuts on the regular. You’d pick up little bits of costume jewelry from the second-hand store for them.
After your funeral, I put our wedding rings out on the deck railing—if I can’t have you, I’ll be friends with your friends, be they crows or ravens.
In the morning they were gone. So I set out peanuts and wait.
