Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A is adapted from the article "Ghost Bird" by Molly Loomis (©2011 by the Sierra Club). Passage B is adapted from the book A Year on the Wing: Four Seasons in a Life with Birds by Tim Dee (©2009 by Tim Dee).

Passage A by Molly Loomis

"It’s a bird!" Tim shouts through the fog.

I drop my shovel into the cache I am digging and look up, frantically scanning the sky—afraid that, like a shooting star, the bird might vanish before I see it.

This is Antarctica. Deep Antarctica—a windswept glacier in the icy interior called the Branscomb. Here, no penguins waddle through rookeries, no seals slip between waves, no albatross glide over icebergs. It has been 43 days since I last saw a living creature other than a human.

The white body of a snow petrel blends into the dense fog—the outline of its outstretched wings, over- size sails for its delicate body, is barely visible. The bird hovers like a ghost, bobbing on a wave of wind. Its beady coal eyes and obsidian feet are the only signs of color. It circles, etching a carving into my memory.

With the subtle shift of a wing, the snow petrel charts a new course—evaporating into the milky soup that surrounds us. It is gone.

That night, with my hat pulled hard over my eyes to block out the ever-present daylight, I listen to the rat-tat-tat drumbeat of soft hail against my tent. The image of the petrel keeps resurfacing. Our encounter was brief—less than two minutes—but the lone bird swoops back and forth across the canvas of my closed eyes.

Despite their delicate physique and thin veil of feathers, snow petrels live in Antarctica year-round. They spend much of the year at sea, then at breeding time fly up to 200 miles inland to reunite with their mates and scratch out nests high on rocky outcroppings. Back and forth the birds fly from the land to the ocean, where they snatch krill, mollusks, and fish from the icy waters. The food sustains them and their chick until the fledgling is ready to fly.

I burrow deeper and listen to the wind grow to a whine. I think of the six plane rides it took to get here—Jackson to Salt Lake to Dallas to Santiago to Punta Arenas to Patriot Hills to Vinson. In a few weeks, we'll retrace our journey back to warmer climes. And when we get home, we’ll share photos and stories and brag about our ability to survive in this stark, inhospitable place.

But the petrel, it will stay.

Passage B by Tim Dee

Another day in September, I was crossing the Bay of Biscay on a ferry and had seen storm petrels. We were straining our eyes looking for spouting whales miles out across the silvery water toward the horizon. The wind was chasing us hard south and attending to the sea's surface with diligence. It picked at acres of water, and as it rose in strength it seemed to go back over the sea to work on smaller and smaller patches until every square inch had its drama. And through this, barely over this, come flying migrant land birds.

Two miles of water were below me, a distance that is less known and less knowable than its equivalent in any other direction. By comparison, the thin air of birds’ lives seems solid and well mapped. Up from the sea’s depths, as from a dream, came fin whales; we slid past one another, and their jaws and undersides lit the sea with an otherworldly blue. Though the ferry was bigger, the vastness of the whale was stupendous. Its back broke the surface and it blew, and the sun caught its breath. Through these fleeting rainbow clouds tiny things appeared in my binoculars and grew to gannets as the ship reached them or they passed it. Then there was a tiny thing that didn’t grow and suddenly was upon us, whizzing overhead, and somehow drawn down toward the ferry and to me. I put down my binoculars and turned my head and two inches away from my face, perched on my left shoulder, was a willow warbler.

To see a land bird at sea is one way to feel how the earth is made and how it can fit a whale and a warbler together. The warbler weighs less than an ounce and has come from who-knows-where to the north; perhaps it was the bird that sang along the railway cutting at the back of my house this spring and lifted my journeys to work; perhaps it was a Norwegian bird, the descendant of the three or four in a gully that I had helped flush into a funnel trap on Fair Isle nearly thirty years before; perhaps it was just a few weeks old and had never seen the sea nor a man apparently standing on it. Its washed green back was the same color as my coat; for a moment we were a bleached and shrunken version of Long John Silver and his parrot, sheltering in the lee of the ferry's funnel. A second later either the bird realized where it had landed or the wind whipped it from my shoulder, and it let itself be lifted into the air, out to the side of the boat, south over the whales and over the sea.