Easy By Nature

There is an old Japanese story about Momotaro the Peach Boy. An elderly childless couple ate a peach and became young again and had a baby boy. When he was a teenager he traveled across the countryside with a pheasant, a dog, and a monkey that joined him because he shared his millet dumplings with them. They traveled together to a remote island where they battled and defeated demons. I thought of that old story as I reached for a peach in my garden.

All photographs from Johnson, T.B., et al. 2026. "Seeing in the dark: Using thermal imaging to directly observe nocturnal migration." Ornithology 143(2). Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Ruby-crowned Kinglet by Tom Johnson. It’s 4 a.m. in Illinois. My son Noah is in Japan, where evening is just coming on. We are on opposite edges of the same shadow — I’m at the trailing rim of the night, he’s at the leading edge of his. His voice fills the room.

I pull up behind a line of cars and park in a gravel lot by Lake Evergreen, my kayak in tow. I walk back to my kayak, and I’m surprised to see a Killdeer flush from the gravel, feign a broken wing and try to lead me away. There is very little space here. The vehicles and the road on one side, the grass on the other. The grass is mowed short by the parks department. The road is busy. And yet there’s a brash bird calling loudly. How could she possibly nest here?

As the Martin House slides down the pole, the air fills with a purple cloud, birds swirling above drenching us in liquid warbles and down-slurred whistles. Then Mercy stops turning the crank and the box comes to rest. Mercy and I have been Purple Martin landlords for this twenty-four-compartment house for a couple of years now. It stands with two other Martin houses in a restored prairie on the edge of an urban lake, where a walking trail passes close by.

I bend and push a stem aside, and there, low in the shade, is a heavy cluster of ripe berries. I work my hand in through the leaves, careful, feeling for them more than seeing them, and I am so lost in the reaching that the high thin whine circling my head barely registers. My fingers close on the cluster just as the mosquito settles on my cheek. I am easing the berries loose, one at a time, when the bite begins to burn.

Inquisitive Black-capped Chickadee Fledgling The sunflower seeds rattle against steel and wood, an avian dinner bell. I press the lid down on the feeder until it seats with a satisfying thud. The morning is hazy and golden, the air still, and the dawn chorus vibrates through the cool foliage — a House Wren spilling its bright tumble of notes, a Gray Catbird running through its borrowed songs. The garden is calm. Then a little storm arrives.

Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge You hear them before you see the water. Driving in toward the refuge the sky begins to fill, ragged lines of waterfowl crossing low over the road, flock after flock wheeling off toward the river, and by the time the wetland comes into view the air itself seems to be moving.

I set up for a four-hour bird sit, hoping a crowd of kids would walk over from the festival to watch birds with me. I had empty picnic tables, six pairs of binoculars, a “Birdwatching Here” sign, and the Constitution Trail on three sides. I looked at the empty tables and imagined them full of curious young birdwatchers, maybe fifty of them. The day seemed promising. People were streaming past just thirty feet away, a conveyor belt of modern momentum.

The tree no one planted plants itself everywhere— fencerow, alley, the seam where garage meets ground. We call it weed. We call it volunteer. The birds call it food. The catbird knows what we refuse: the branch bent low with fruit, red going to black going to ink. She takes the gift with her whole gray body, chin stained like a child’s, like mine, like yours. White mulberry crossed with red, neither one nor the other, a tree of two minds that settled on neither.

On being considered by wild birds They arrive singly, slipping through the canopy and sliding across the water. Then in threes and fours, then a dozen at once. As they settle, their contact calls quiet. By the time the flock has gathered there are thirty, mostly drakes, a few hens. They move quickly to the densest wooded cover, huddling, turning, bobbing, scanning. I sit still in the Buttonbush, my body obscured by camouflage fabric, my face masked by a mesh screen.