Sister Becky retired on October 1, 2024 and to celebrate this end of a rich and long teaching life we decided to disconnect her from her computer and head out on a walking trip, or maybe you’d call it a hiking trip through the middle of France. We settled on the Stevenson trail, the secular steps of a secular man, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, that parallels the religious path of those pilgrims walking toward Compestello. I thought of us as pilgrims as well, walking our way toward a less anxious, and more present life. Stevenson, writing of his journey that set the trail’s route said it well: “When the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?” So for six days, we had nothing to do but worry about the next step, the next meal, the next bed for the night. And that simple life worked its magic on us, even if we did not walk with a donkey named Modestine. We walked, instead, with Thomas, Becky’s son, who served donkey-like to carry the heavy pack. He was also lead laugher, his laughter carrying us down the trails.

On December 18, I rose at 2:45 in the morning, and in perfect silence and darkness drove out to Ulster County, intent on starting Christmas Bird Count with the secretive birds, the owls. They were holding out on us—that is, not hooting--as Peter and I drove to perfect owl locations, listened and whistled. Eventually we heard a few Screech Owls, but we never heard a single toot from a Saw-whet (an owl that has been reliable on our count). Peter and I both felt this was a bad omen, surely a lousy count was going to unfold in daylight hours. Plus, we had dreadful weather. As our sector leader, Steve Chorvas put it: “Environmental conditions can best be described as wet and dreary with low visibility.” Indeed!

But we were wrong. There were birds. On this 2021 Christmas Bird Count—my eleventh in this sector, marking my years as a devoted birder—in Ulster County, New York, what we saw and counted were American Robins. Thousands. At every stop to look and listen and count we heard the song of the Robin, giving our rainy day the sound and feel of early spring, not early winter. They darted near the winterberry, they hopped through tangles of multi flora rose, they speckled small lawns. There were 416 of them. The only bird we saw more of were European Starlings, at 418. Together these two species made up half of the birds that Peter and I saw on that long day of counting birds.

The dawn chorus in the jungle has a particular bass beat, like a deep wave washing through the dense trees, or like the earth itself is exhaling. What is that, I wonder. I’m sitting in a dinky plastic pack raft on the Las Piedras River, cradling my camera, and straining to see something in the green on green on green that lines the river. I’ve set out with three others on this foggy dawn float, but they are already a bend and a half down the river so I feel alone. Alone with the caiman lounging on the sandy banks and the Pied Lapwings tip-toeing along the river’s edge. Alone with the Parakeets that flock across the river, screaming their destination and their joy. Alone with the Sunbittern and the Hoatzin, birds that seem created from an artist’s fantasy of a bird. Alone not at all.

I’m grateful that it is only on the third day that Paul tells me that the Las Piedras River, where we have been boating, floating and swimming, my clothes perpetually wet from the afternoon plunges, is swimming with Piranhas. I knew about the Caiman, Spectacled and Yellow, that I’ve seen lounging on the banks, and scoot off whenever the boat comes near. I’ve tamed my response to snakes—an embarrassing nerve-jangling recoil—by understanding that every snake is more afraid of me than I am of it. But Piranhas, that’s news. I laugh and say: cool.

Of all the fruits: cherries. Of all the months: October. Of all of the holidays: Thanksgiving. Of all of the birds: Rusty Blackbird. But--of all the groups of birds: shorebirds.

All birders have his or her favorite group or family of birds: the raptors in migration or the sparrows in a field. For many it’s easy: warblers in spring. For me, it’s shorebirds. Perhaps because I do associate them with water, the shore. Perhaps because I have spent so little time with them, the birds here in the Hudson Valley uncommon except in migration and even then there are few. Perhaps this group of birds retains a certain mystery because they are so elusive to me. And so when my friend Peter started reporting big numbers of shorebirds—a dozen Pectoral Sandpipers, a White-rumped Sandpiper, plus over forty Snipe at the Vly, a swamp in the northern edge of Ulster County, I had to go.

When I first heard the rattling call I was walking along a small lake in Ontario, east of Sault St. Marie and West of Sudbury. I’d been driving my little camper for eight hours, after getting up in the lovely Two Rivers Campground in Algonquin Provincial Park. Since I was tired and since it was late in the day I thought: you are hallucinating. There can’t be Sandhill Cranes here in the far north in early September.

When, at 3 in the morning, I again heard that distinctive call I thought: this is a dream, no cranes.

In the morning, I emerged from the cocoon that is my little camper and scanned the range of RVs in the tidy campground, the set up mobile homes for those who came through the season, the more portable campers that were there a night or two. My eye was drawn to a bird feeder tempting in Goldfinch set up near one of the mobile homes. And there stood two cranes. Not plastic statues of cranes, as you might imagine in such a campground, real winged, breathing birds. They tip toed as delicately as a long-legged bird can, inspecting the short grass and only half-wary of me and a woman walking her dog. Cranes. In Canada.

I’ve always seen Sandhill Cranes in Arizona, the desert, and so think of them as birds that love the heat and dry. They fly into Wilcox, east of Tucson, by the hundreds, thousands, landing and taking off all flailing legs and wings. But there never seem to be actual collisions. I’ve stood, mesmerized by the loud, purring sound of the birds, and by the sheer numbers, all come to spend the winter there where it’s warm, where there’s food.