I see a kildeer couple on the lower levee this morning loitering on an inhospitable edge of hard pan, a track of decomposed granite and gravel, racing back and forth on their long skinny legs, looking agitated and vigilant as a hiker approaches. One takes flight, sounding it’s shrill two-syllable alarm, its long wings pitched up the steep slope to a trail that borders backyards and park.
I watch it, and I want to go looking for its nest. For no reason, really. I mean, it’s none of my business now, is it?—the domesticity of this handsome pair with their white bellies, their chestnut brown wings and backs.
Do all of us humans have this insatiable curiosity? Oh, I want to see these eggs. I’m sure you’re hiding them somewhere near, aren’t you? In some tiny recessed niche on the bare ground. I tell myself my curiosity is tempered with concern. Isn’t there something I can do to protect this young family? But I know there is not. This is simply a longing of mine, a desire to observe what is natural and beautiful, a species whose experience is direct, unfiltered through contemplation and language: taste and scent, perhaps the crunch of insects, sensation of sex, “childbirth,” the imperative urge to shelter one’s unborn progeny in a reedy nest exposed to the open air on the ground.
Is this a smart way to live? Can’t I help somehow? Though you and your ancestors have survived in this fashion, reveled perhaps joyfully, for millennium?
If I can’t help, won’t you please let me see? Let me wonder in gratitude for all I do not understand.
Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash
