Creature Note: On Birds That Look Like Omens

Sometimes the sky fills with wings and you have to admit you do not know enough names yet.

This week it was kites — I think kites. Large, unhurried, circling the roadside like they were reading it. A field guide would settle the question, but the field guide is under the passenger seat, under a cat, and some questions are allowed to stay open until the cat moves.

There is a category of bird that looks like an omen whether or not it is one. Anything black and patient. Anything that watches you longer than seems necessary. Anything that arrives exactly when you were thinking about something difficult, which — if you are on the road, living in a motorhome, rebuilding a life — is most of the time. The statistics of omens are unfair that way.

I have started keeping a list in the margin of the road notebook. Not of species. Of appearances. The heron that stood in a drainage ditch like it was owed money. The three magpies on the dead tree outside the laundromat. The owl I did not see but heard, twice, which counts differently.

A naturalist would tell me this is not a rigorous system. But the camp is not a rigorous institution. The camp records what showed up and how it felt, and lets the categories argue among themselves.

The working theory: a bird is an omen if it makes you pay attention. By that definition, all of them are, which is either a flaw in the theory or the entire point of it.