right hand pointing

Cara Chamberlain
 

       A rarity on this continent, he moves restlessly from palm to feeder to mulberry. He has arrived somehow, over the sea, and he is iridescent with a carnival of blue-black feathers within which two black-bean irises glint. He grooms and eats among the common grackles. He is a parasite, and his coming may be an ominous sign for native birds. Is he an accidental arrival or a pioneer?

       For now, he is perched on the cottage roof, unaware or not that he is a cause célèbre as twenty sets of binoculars bring him into focus and residents’ dogs dance joyfully, believing apparently that all the fuss is about them. “There he is! See him? There! Right on the roof.” Quiet at first, the voices have crescendoed as it has become apparent that the bird cannot be frightened off by chatter.

       Inside their house, the ranger and her husband feel trapped. They haven’t spoken since the birders arrived with the spring migration fallout. She sits, exhausted in her green shirt and khaki shorts, thumbing through the new Sibley’s Guide, binoculars around her neck. Once, she had walked in surf-dazed solitude among the island’s invasive Australian pines, cast up along the shore, again God knows how. Once she had enjoyed tallying up the new spring arrivals—Cape May warbler, blackpoll warbler, indigo bunting. Now she can’t step outside without being accosted by shiny cowbird addicts. And her husband is worthless in this situation, showing his true colors, it seems, for the first time in the twelve weeks of their marriage. He is perched astride a kitchen chair, threatening to toss his two new step-kids out of the house if they don’t clean up the breakfast dishes. His once benign face is contorted into a rage deepened by their collective confinement, and his shiny black hair, usually so beautifully waved, is now rumpled and wild in the uncombed morning.

       His wife raises her binoculars and looks through the wrong end. The creature she sees is distant, self-important, oblivious.