Invisible Beasts

by Sharona Muir

  So begin the game: steal her eggs, her newly adopted chicken children, by scattering corn outside. She’ll unseat herself like a shimmering cloud, rise on indigo stilts, bend her long feet as if inserting them into high-heeled pumps, and quickly tiptoe out the door to graze, for she’s very hungry. When your Foster Fowl returns to find her eggs in your hands, she doesn’t rush you screaming or stab her blue beak in your blood. Instead she glides to the trees bordering your yard, teeters there, a silvery teardrop, and melts away into the forest. Now, now she is your quarry to be pursued with eager questions. How many species, and which, will the Foster Fowl incubate? How many avian species owe a boost, and how many abandoned broods owe their success, to a mother whose all-enfolding love does not discriminate between her kind and others?

  I LIVE NEAR A SPOT known as the Warbler Capital of the World. In spring, bird fanciers from all over converge here, on a boardwalk surrounded by marshes, to jostle fiercely for position, sometimes even erecting their camera tripods over the heads of other birders who have knelt down to peer into the brush, binoculars at the ready, oblivious. Complete strangers, standing cheek by jowl, exchange intelligence on the likeliest location of the blue-headed vireo or the ruby-crowned kinglet. Men dressed like hunters tote weapon-sized lenses; old couples bicker in soft voices over their lists of “life birds”—a life bird is one that you see for the very first time. Ten years ago, it didn’t occur to me that the first Foster Fowl to visit my porch—my own life bird, whom I nicknamed “My Blue Heaven”—was anything but an accidental. Something soars overhead looking for Nova Scotia: that’s an accidental. But My Blue Heaven wasn’t, after all, an accidental: she hadn’t gone out of her way at all. She was a harbinger.

  I’d discovered My Blue Heaven brooding a plateful of new eggs I’d laid down momentarily, and the game came about by accident. When she fled into the woods, I decided to track her. Since she was obviously flightless, the best method was to seek the nests of birds that laid their eggs on the ground, and might attract her. While consulting Peterson’s long list of these, I noticed something curious: many birds were shifting their ranges northward. I should have thought! Birds as different as the tiny blue-gray gnatcatcher and the lumbering turkey vulture were moving northward. Why didn’t I put two and two together? What was I thinking?

  I ought, I ought to have wondered what a blatantly southern bird like My Blue Heaven, with her morpho butterfly looks and her uselessness for winter, was doing near Lake Erie. She must have walked, maybe all the way from Florida. And after her, I saw only females (except, memorably, once). Why? Why didn’t I mull it over? Because I was stupid. Because I was having too much fun, finding out which eggs the Foster Fowls mothered, as if nature had developed a new summer sport for my benefit. All for me, I gloated, setting the lure of the orphan eggs, sprinkling the trail of corn, and finding the world’s most beautiful blues in a downy cloud. All for me, the thrill of tracking. How many of us are philosophical enough to question the whys and wherefores of a pleasure? I wasn’t, as I hot-footed it into the summer woods. All for me. Imbecile.

  TO FIND A FOSTER FOWL in the greenwood wasn’t easy, because only in pursuit of a blue creature does one appreciate how much blue there is in green. Where eyes failed I tried ears, parting the brush between trees, listening. Phew! called the veeries back and forth, and Freebie! freebie! screamed the phoebe, and Truly to thee, sang the bluebirds, and the killdeer, whose species is Vociferus, was, and Wheat, wheat, wheat to you, sang a cardinal whose babies shrilled Feed-me-feed-me-feed-me-feed-me. I went to the marsh around my pond, and spent hours crouched under tickling grasses, binoculars glued to my eye sockets. The pond, at the bottom of a quarry, continuously reflected a quivering, linear, blue light that caressed the stone walls, and where the walls met the water stood cattails and reeds. That’s where I found My Blue Heaven. For weeks, I studied the volitional shimmer that gave her away, that wasn’t sky or water or light, but a maternal breast. I grew very curious, because no pheasant can swim like a duck . . . but when the time came, there it was: a bobbing chain of ducklings, dabbling, shaking their baby rumps, in the ripples and on the sand beside My Blue Heaven’s hiding place.

  In later years, I followed my egg-deprived Foster Fowls to the nests of mute swans, Canada geese, woodcocks, whippoorwills, bobwhites, and once, a kingfisher, and never discovered how they did it—how they taught the young of other species. But somehow, they did.

  In those years, I could count on three or four Foster Fowls in a summer. I never saw their chicks: not one blue puffball, and I wondered (though not enough*). Where were their mates? A pheasant female wandering, all alone, in search of abandoned eggs—why didn’t this bother me more? Such birds live in harems with a territorial male. Nature doesn’t make roving bachelor hens. Of course, invisible animals can be very different from their visible counterparts, but it was still odd. I knew that My Blue Heaven was an invisible bird because I’d tried to photograph her, but the pictures showed only an assortment of ducks, swans, geese, woodcocks, and other ordinary birds. For some reason, invisible animals do not show up on camera. It is a great handicap to amateur naturalists of invisible wildlife, like myself, and it is a great pity. Especially considering what ultimately happened.

  One day, I found my royal cloud sitting in a dent in the grass, barely a nest, on a clutch of creamy eggs that I glimpsed when she rose to turn them with her deft turquoise beak. I stared till my eyes watered, in the shadows where a pebbled sort of whistle announced a single, obsessed cricket.

  “You crazy girl,” I thought, “you insane bird. This, I have got to see.”

  And I did see, soon afterward—on my computer screen, as I scanned the photographs taken by my infrared camera. These pictures explained why the Foster Fowl needs to be invisible. Otherwise, she’d be a meal for the young owl caught—wings perpendicular between tree trunks—clutching a limp cardinal. How had she reared this raptor, whose habits were the cruel opposite of her own? How mysterious was the being that I hunted through summer after summer, her loving kindness as abundant as the air. My instincts became honed to clues I was not conscious of—hunches of the feet, guesses of the inner compass—that led me into ever deeper concealments, obscurer hiding places. I gagged at the sapphire on a ripe, torn corpse, crooning her cradle song as if a vulture’s nest were purest myrrh . . .

  TEN YEARS AGO, I saw my last Foster Fowl. It was an August morning. The bells, rattles, and whistles in the insect world rose into a sky stuffed with pale flames. Thwock! A walnut smacked the turf, just missing my skull. Hello, gravity and time. I felt suddenly fed up with gravity and time and their boring threats; I felt put upon by natural law, and went into the woods swinging a long stick to sweep away the spiderwebs that I really had no business to ravage, given how excellent an animal a spider is. With that arrogance of ours, like some pompous bureaucrat in a Byzantine procession, I marched through the woods swaying my stick in front of me, tearing down what I couldn’t see and didn’t want to. I marched into a stand of oaks about four inches high. Each green shoot spread a top cluster of five large leaves, like a puppy’s big paws. A stand of mighty oaks was trying to grow up here. Then I saw my Foster Fowl, in the spattered light. Her neck was sunk in her breast, while her candy-yellow eyes, swiveling toward me, registered broodiness, the mother love that belongs so completely to birds. (Only domestic hens are unmotherly, because we’ve bred it out of them.) Her throat inflated as she crooned. She looked as if a valve had opened beneath her nest, inside the earth where it was still a molten star, and was shooting a warm ray through her heart. After a while, she cranked up on her indigo stilts, shook out her wings, and went pecking among the infant oaks. I fiddled with the focus adjustment and heard my own voice, spontaneous as any birdcall:

  Oh no! Oh shit! Oh, no.

  And it was stupid to have marched over, crunching leaf litter under my boots. Stupid to have knelt by the woven nest-cup, putting my big human paw there, tossing eggs into the woods, good riddance to bad eg
gs, to thuggish cowbirds. I detest cowbirds. For every cowbird egg stealing space in another species’ nest, there’s one more disappointment in the world. Okay, and it was stupid to have panicked when I found myself electrified, on my feet, backing away from a three-foot-high chunk of enraged lapis lazuli with ruby eyes and crimson crest, stretching out his wicked long neck with a blue beak and a black tongue hollering like a turkey on the warpath, Rotter-rotter-rotter-rotter-rotter-rotter-rotterrrrr! I took to my heels. Laugh if you like, it was terrible. I had finally met a male Foster Fowl. There was nothing soft in his feathers or his comportment. I’ll never know whether it was he and his mate who wove the nest with that last, sole egg . . . that last egg at the bottom of the nest, which may, or may not, have been a Foster Fowl’s. I came back later. The nest was moved. I don’t blame them. I will never know.

  THE NEXT SUMMER, I set out my chicken-egg lure: no Foster Fowl came, though raccoons did. I waited all summer. The summer after that, I set out eggs again: no Foster Fowl came, though raccoons did and trashed my porch with my own trash. I spent the summer lurking in all her usual spots; I watched the poor, bare eggs, in many an abandoned nest, snatched up by squirrels, crunched down by foxes, engulfed by snakes. And the summer after that. And the summer after that.

  WHEN MY SUMMER FUN appeared to be gone, I did what all humans do when their fun is gone. I looked around for something to blame. I picked up the phone and called Evie, who as a biologist was interested in the whole story, up to my sighting of the male Foster Fowl, and as a sibling, was amused at the thought of her older sister acting like a nitwit.

  “Wow, that was really stupid,” she said. “Cowbirds are evil? Compared to, like, humans?”

  “Do you think they’ll ever come back?” I begged.

  “Um, Sophie, I would guess that your birds are over-producing females, which species do in hard times. And this heavily female population is moving north, because their habitat’s screwed up. That’s what ornithologists call the escalator to extinction.”

  I imagined an escalator on which grinning human skeletons, clutching handbags, rose into a dark department store.

  “What that means,” Evie continued, “is like, birds follow the plants and animals they eat into cooler climates. The farther north they go, the worse they do, because they’re going into conditions for which they haven’t evolved. The thing is, your females don’t sound very weather-resistant. So if they’re dying in the winters up here, that puts, like, more pressure on the species. Which, in response, produces even more females, who die in the winter. You follow?”

  “Yes,” I said, repressing the urge to say I wasn’t stupid, because I was.

  “The species gets thinned out. It’s a vicious circle. If climate change weren’t happening so fast, maybe they’d adapt. Like, a mutation could produce hard-feathered females who could survive the cold. As it is . . .” A near-audible shrug. “Some of my colleagues think that global warming will wipe out like thirty percent of land-bird species in this century.”

  “Are you joking?” I croaked. “Look, I know you think I’m crazy. But please.”

  “You,” laughed my sister, “totally have an imagination. And you care about animals. You know what I think? Without imagination, we can’t stop extinction. That’s the main problem with getting people mobilized. Thirty percent of land birds—it’s not just about, oh, I don’t see my woodpeckers at the feeder, oh, I can’t bag my pheasant, whatever. It’s not about fun. It’s about survival. Because a bird touches so much—the plants it pollinates, the organisms it eats, the predators, the whole incredible cascade of species it affects. I mean, mass extinction is incredibly dangerous. But for most people—hey, the world is full of animals, the sky is full of birds, like—nobody has to imagine life without them.” Evie spoke with passion, which made her sound like someone with pressing errands to run. I was standing in the sunlit porch, phone in hand, hanging my head. Shadows of leaves trembled over the stone floor, as if fossil leaves, embedded in the slate, were struggling to surface.

  THE BLAME FOR LOSING the Foster Fowl fell squarely on me, the only human being who had seen her, yet taken her for granted. Why hadn’t I trapped one, built a rookery, nurtured a breeding pair? Why hadn’t I used my special gift of seeing the invisible to protect what others couldn’t see? It would have been no more than what naturalists and biologists do when they try to protect some unsung creature performing the work of life, some necessary being that lacks the allure of a politician’s face, an entertainer’s breasts, or a soldier’s corpse. The longer I reflected, the larger loomed the loss. I missed my fun, then I mourned the Foster Fowl’s absence in the world and would have been overjoyed to know, sight unseen, that she still existed, rearing the abandoned young of others. Then, gradually, the grandeur of the chance that I had squandered became apparent. If My Blue Heaven could teach a duck to swim, an owl to hunt, and a vulture to scavenge, what might a human being have learned from her? We don’t really know what we’re fit for, what human nature really is or might be, but we do know that our nature fits into the space created by all the other animals, a particular wisdom learned among them, and the Foster Fowl was the best teacher of them all. Too late!

  Reader, when I die, and my soul goes to be weighed, when my soul is weighed as the Egyptians prophesied, on a scale against the weight of truth itself—a single feather—which way will those scales tip? I don’t know. You tell me.

  *I did try to find out if Foster Fowl chicks were being hatched out here by tweezing apart the regurgitated pellets lying under owl nests. I probed the pellets of short-eared owls, great horned owls, and Owls of Aurora (invisible owls that hunt at daybreak, although their skills are far more suited to nocturnal hunting, so they don’t do too well, but never learn any better). No owls were regurgitating Foster Fowl bones.

  4

  Picture this allegory: Two angels stand on either side of Evolution’s throne, each holding a symbol. Competition holds a lamp that, like a predator’s eyes, shines on the circle of creatures favored by natural selection. Symbiosis holds the rainbow, whose arch spans the horizon of the living earth. Around Symbiosis’s feet grow flowering plants that co-evolved with pollinating animals. Symbiosis’s trailing sleeve is beaded with tiny eukaryotic cells, from whose merging of bacteria and archaea all the earth’s plants and animals spring. Without Competition—chaos. Without Symbiosis—nullity. This is a tale on the side of Symbiosis, and I have mentioned angels because when I ponder the existence of the soul and spiritual things, I think of Beanie Sharks.

  Beanie Sharks

  IT WAS ON THE TOP FLOOR of a natural history museum, where they keep the artifacts of oceanic tribes, on a rainy afternoon. There were pools of light, and in one of them a display case, and near it a bench on which I sank in disbelief. I went back up to the case, put my hands in my pockets, craned forward again, reread the typed labels. I stared at the remains of an animal that had been misclassified as “ritual object, or toy.” Then I returned to the bench and tried to absorb what I had seen, hanging my wrists over my knees and staring at the floor. To know that an extinction is coming and be unable to sound an alarm, because the creature is invisible . . . But most beasts are invisible, more or less—people don’t know about them, or don’t pay attention to them, and then they disappear, invisible forever and to everyone. It’s no consolation to think that even if most people saw invisible beasts, they still might not care.

  I got up again, went over to the display case, and looked at the remains again, the way you look and look at the accessories of a pet who has died. Or the way people look at a stuffed extinct animal, like a moa, arranged by a taxidermist to seem capable of coming back to life, so that we lower our voices and suppress notes of wonder, as if the beast could hear us, which is what we really want—after all, our murmurs tell the stuffed corpse, we can see you, know you, so you must be here, not altogether gone? Surely you are still somehow here? But the stuffed thing doesn’t move from its wired spot in the museum diorama
. Thanks to the longevity of museums it will likely outlast us, and when we’re dead and buried and in the carbon cycle, it will be still sitting with its moth-eaten fur, its desiccated feathers, its upholstery scales. Of all humanity’s monuments—ideas, structures, artworks, devices—the ones that represent us most enduringly are those unique and eternal absences, the extinctions.

  I knew this animal. It looked like a beige porcelain Frisbee, and was the shell of a giant limpet attached, in life, to a much bigger, invisible beast. Half a partnership lay in the display case, between visible and invisible. Morosely fingering the plastic museum pass that couldn’t be shredded, and shouldn’t be chewed, I sighed. What if our own bodies had invisible parts, unseen symbiotic partners who helped us function? Not souls, exactly. They would be animals, as real as the invisible Beanie Shark, whose visible partner, the Cap limpet, lay here. The parquetry squeaked as I leaned forward, breathing on the glass. “Unknown ritual object, or toy.” I didn’t know what made me sadder, the Cap limpet, sedulously mislabeled—or its Beanie Shark, somewhere in the ocean, bereft of a partnership that after hundreds of millions of years was now dissolving . . .

  THE OCEANGOING FISH are hard to know. The original vertebrate lineage, they dwell in life’s essential sphere; if you broke the continents and melted the volcanoes down to stubs, nothing much would change for them. Yet when we think of human babies, we ought to think of sharks. They are the animals who most closely resemble us in embryo, reports a Harvard biologist. Shark heads and human heads develop very similarly, from four embryonic scallops called the gill arches. Each gill arch develops into an area of the human, or shark, head; and each gill arch contains genes that direct its development, so that sharks become sharklike, while humans become humanlike. Bones that become jaws in a shark, become ear bones in a human. (A very bad sonnet by Keats says that his ear is open “like a greedy shark”—technically, he wasn’t far off.) In embryo, humans, basking sharks, and Beanie Sharks look exactly the same. A Beanie is an invisible basking shark, and would be identical to the visible kind if not for the giant limpet, programmed to grow along with it, that tweaks its genes in embryo. As a result, the Beanie’s head is altered slightly. But first let me tell you about basking sharks, those noble fish among whom I’ve swum while scuba diving off the coast of Scotland.