One cannot live on this bay for 23 years, with eyes open, and not feel awed by the unrestrained flourish and fecundity of birds.  In my small world, they furnish the motion and sound that dominate each day.  In other words…life.

I have made a hobby of knowing them.  I watch them, study them, listen to them.  A shelf in my house holds nothing but books about birds, all well used.  I know our birds by sight, by silhouette, by flight pattern, by time and place, by behavior, by song.  I know our residents, and I know those who only visit or migrate here to spend winters.  I treasure each species, each bird, and each time I learn something new about them I treasure them more.  In my relations with birds, familiarity breeds affection, and I know and love them well.

But they can still humble me.  Just tonight, as I stepped out to the deck to sip a bit of Scotch and to watch lightning far to the east, I heard a bird I have not heard before.  A single, clear, brief note, falling and echoing faintly at its end, sounded above the shore.  It continued again and again, so that I could hear the bird rising in the air over the bay, then dropping and moving over my yard before soaring again over the water.

I was entranced.  This was a bird call like no other I’ve heard before.  The night is very dark, no moon lightening a sky shrouded by storm clouds.  I got no glimpse of the bird itself.

What was it?  I have no idea.  Perhaps I never will.  I haven’t heard it before in all these years; perhaps I’ll never hear it again.  It will trouble and perplex me – I really want to know this new bird that courses through my world so late at night.

I’ll have to live instead with an intriguing mystery.