Invisible Beasts by Sharona Muir

Author:Sharona Muir [Muir, Sharona]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781934137819
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

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.

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