Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush

by Ruth Joffre

Yesterday, I was a bird. A slender-billed curlew, to be exact. My girlfriend helped me ID the bird. Took photographs of my decurved bill, the flash of white under my tail, the small brown speckles on my cream-white breast.

“Some of these spots look like hearts,” I said this morning, once I was human again and able to compare her pictures to the one in an article I found: “The Slender-Billed Curlew Is Declared Extinct.”

It always happens like this: a species disappears once and for all, and I transform into a replica of it for one day. Thirteen hours, at least, maybe more if I wake up especially early. It takes about an hour each way for the metamorphosis to be complete — long enough, in theory, for me to prepare. To lock the doors, rush to the bathtub if I feel gills opening in my throat. I often track the process in the mirror as it unfolds. Watch scales harden over my flesh, feathers push through my pores. It never stops feeling like magic.

My parents were frightened, of course. The first time it happened, I was just a baby. Not yet three weeks old, and already my skin was turning gold. My mother thought it was jaundice. One of her parenting books mentioned it. Something about a buildup of bilirubin. A newborn’s liver couldn’t process it fast enough. She called the doctor’s office to ask what she should do, did I need to visit the emergency room, was it something in her breast milk, but the nurses said it was fine; this just happens sometimes.

“Babies are weird. That’s what they said.”

By the time she returned to the crib, my first transformation was complete. I was the golden toad, Incilius periglenes. “I came back in, and it was just sitting there, in a puddle of your clothes.” My diaper was clean, thankfully, or else my toad self would have hopped away and left my mother to assume I’d been kidnapped. Was this a curse, she wondered. Or a particularly weird case of post-partum depression? When my father got home, he confirmed she wasn’t hallucinating. There was indeed a fiery orange toad in my room. Practical man that he was, he assumed she just misplaced me, put me down somewhere, then forgot.

He kept asking, “Where did you go today? Think. Did you go to the store?”

And then the toad grew a human foot.

My girlfriend asked me once what it felt like. If I remembered myself while I was a Guam flying fox, hanging upside down from the pipe of the showerhead. The simple answer is no. My brain is different. My memories of her and of us are gone, and all that remains is a vague, primal sense of comfort. I didn’t bite her as a bat. I didn’t peck her as a bird. When she offered a palmful of feed, I landed on it happily and picked through all the seed to find the dried berries, just like I do when she pours me a bowl of granola. Was I myself then? She didn’t think so. For her, it was as if I had been possessed by the vengeful ghost of a Bachman’s warbler seeking retribution for the loss of its loved ones; but for me it was as if I had been gifted new eyes, new senses. When I flapped my wings, I detected the Earth’s magnetic fields and knew I could follow them all the way to Florida and across the strait to Cuba. That isn’t suffering. That’s wonder.

Brujería, my grandmother called it. Some kind of evil magic. I was baptized. Blessed. Exorcized. Tested for genetic disorders. None of it made a difference. My results came back normal, normal, normal, normal.

“I can’t find a single thing wrong with this baby,” the pediatrician declared, with a stern expression, as if he were beginning to suspect my parents were the problem. “I don’t want to see this child again until her next checkup. Understand?”

That was all it took for my parents to stop asking the doctor for help and start studying zoology. My mother enrolled in night classes at a nearby community college. My father got a job as a park ranger at a wildlife refuge thirty miles southeast of Norfolk. They moved to the country. Bought an old farmhouse with a little basement where I could undergo my transformations in private. I remember it being peaceful. Sad.

If you were to watch my family’s home movies from that time, though, it might look different. In some of them, I’m a normal child, running down the boardwalk, playing in the sand dunes, but in another I’m stuck halfway between a human teen and a Yangtze river dolphin, thrashing around a clawfoot bathtub, while my parents scramble to fill a new aboveground pool in the tight confines of our basement. Amid cement walls and boxes of junk, it looks out of place — menacing, even —  not at all like the one in my friend Britney Davis’ backyard, where every summer on her birthday I would swim until my fingertips pruned and then gorge myself on popsicles while half-heartedly pretending to like boys. I understood by then that I was different. I knew how it felt to climb up a tree and sing for love from the highest branch. I had burrowed under frozen earth to build a home for myself and my children. Football seemed superfluous in comparison.

My parents and I never had the words to name what was happening to me. In the videos, you can see them poring over dusty old field guides and textbooks, trying to work out the correct ID.

“It’s clearly a species of songbird,” my mother muses aloud, while I peck at the seeds in my cage. But which one? This is before the internet (before search engines and identification apps and reverse-image-lookups make light work of many tricky IDs), and my parents must settle for documenting their notes in a vast homemade database. A small passerine. Olive-green back, yellow belly, black legs, long decurved bill like a hook. Honeycreeper, perhaps? Of course, now we know how close they were: the Oʻahu nukupuʻu was a Hawaiian honeycreeper endemic to Oahu. It was presumed extinct in 2009, after exhaustive searches by ornithologists. Our record dates from 2001, a month after I turned twelve.

“You were so young,” my girlfriend said — but was I? By then, I had lived a hundred lives and died a hundred deaths, and I remembered every single one of them.

More species go extinct every year than you realize. Scientists are hesitant to use that term unless they have proof, but how do you prove absence? How can you be sure the beetle wasn’t hiding in a log when researchers went looking for it? I transformed into the golden toad in August of 1989, but the species wasn’t officially listed as extinct until 2004. That fifteen year gap? That was hope playing tricks with the heart. Scientists trekking deep into the cloud forest of northern Costa Rica and thinking, Maybe we missed them. Maybe they’re breeding earlier or later or to the south. It’s impossible for them to know what I know: the last golden toad died in the sun. It was hot and dry that year. In spring, when the toads were supposed to emerge from their burrows to mate in pools of rainwater that collect between the roots of ancient trees, this toad was the only one around. He dipped his toes in the cool water. Floated in the dappled light of the forest floor until his instincts told him to go. Find a mate. Cross the whole forest if you have to.

What would you do if you were the last of your kind? My girlfriend says she would go out on the road. Buckle my urn into the passenger seat and sprinkle a little bit of my ashes in every park and forest she encountered. Eventually, after stopping in every state in the Lower 48, she would make her way to Alaska. Climb Denali in a single, sleepless push. If she survived, she would head over to Mount Hunter. Mount Bona. Mount Fairweather. She would keep doing this, she said, until the inevitable happened. Maybe then she wouldn’t be afraid. Maybe then she would understand what it all means.

Everyone always says magic has rules. Logic. A system that makes sense — at least to itself. But I don’t actually think that’s true. In my experience, magic is as much a force of will as a byproduct of desire and happenstance. You miss your bus one day and get caught in a rainstorm only to find yourself waiting at a crosswalk with the woman of your dreams, who offers to share her umbrella for a couple blocks, just until she reaches her office, and just enough time to get her number. You offer to buy her brunch that Sunday as thanks but in the middle of the date you start transforming into a dragonfly. Your eyes give you away, the lenses bulging and expanding in a way that makes her think you’re having an allergic reaction. You let her believe it, at first. You put on sunglasses, you settle the bill as quickly as you can, but when you try to rush home she follows you. She sees your wings unfold, the gossamer thin veins as fresh and new as the morning dew. You tell her not to be afraid, and when she lies and says she isn’t you’re grateful for the kindness. She sits in your apartment all day, watching you fly, studying your stuff. When you change back, she lets you lay your head in her lap and strokes your hair with such concern. Isn’t that magic?

Every so often, I transform into a species no one knew existed: a louse so small my girlfriend has to tiptoe out of the apartment and wait outside for fear of stepping on me by accident; a fish from the midnight zone, its skin so tender and translucent you can see the blood flow through its heart. Once, I was a diving bird, a type of alcid, I think, that spent its entire life on the ice floes north of Siberia, venturing inland only once per year to nest three hundred feet up in an old growth forest, where only the owls could reach them. If humans ever saw this bird, it was only by chance, while hunting or logging, and the rarity of the species was lost on them. Once, I tried to email a famous ornithologist about it and he suggested the bird was a marbled murrelet (an endangered shorebird of coastal Alaska) and should be returned to the wild, but that’s impossible; the wild it once knew is gone and never coming back.

On her days off, my girlfriend has been helping me digitize the old analog entries in the database. A librarian by trade and A/V kid at heart, she knows how to restore faded photographs and color-correct deteriorating film stocks. She can look at what was once a top-of-the-line camcorder back in the nineties and know exactly what discontinued cable to buy off eBay. We spend weekends in a haze of the past, watching millennia of evolution disappear on a grainy home video. Sometimes we glean enough information to make a retrospective ID.

For example, on January 5, 1992, I was an Angel Island mouse, a species endemic to Ángel de la Guarda Island in my father’s native Mexico. In recordings from that day, I’m scurrying through a network of yellow plastic tunnels my father built in case some critically endangered rodents went extinct. I spend hours exploring the structure, repeatedly working my way up to the highest point and peering out of the plastic bubble, as if wondering where the mountains are. Eventually, I give up. Come down to the gate where my mother sits. Eat the cheese she offers. It is small comfort.

On March 18, 1996, I was a splendid poison frog — a bright red dart hopping from one step to the next as my father raced up the stairs ahead of me, ensuring I couldn’t escape. In the video, he and I stand in front of the basement door, staring each other down, while my mother climbs the steps, zooming in on my face. I blink up at him, eyes ink-black and shiny, as if dipped in crude oil; then I reluctantly turn around and hop back downstairs, my figure disappearing in the gloom.

Also in 1996, a Chiriqui harlequin frog and a Raiatea tree snail.

In 2000, a Pyrenean ibex.

Over the years, a Bramble Cay melomys, Christmas Island pipistrelle, Pinta Island tortoise, Santa Maria ground beetle, St. Helena earwig, St. Lucia skink, long jaw tristramella, sharp-snouted day frog, Aguiguan reed warbler, western black rhino, bridled white-eye, cunning silverside, imperial woodpecker, Bachman’s warbler, stirrup shell mussel, large Kauai thrush.

Only after seeing the heart-shaped spots did I realize: I’ve been a slender-billed curlew before. In 1997. My mother’s Polaroids are blurry, the film distorted with age, but I recognize the beak — its glossy black tip, its slight downward curve. Her note in the record reads simply: Curlew — species unidentified. According to researchers, the last official sighting of the species was in 1995, which means this lone female held on for two more years, making annual trips across the Balkans (from the steppes of Kazakhstan to the shores of Morocco) until its flock finally dwindled down to one. What I remember most from that first visit is the confusion: the little sparks of hope dwindling to ash whenever the last female saw a flock of Eurasian curlews and thought maybe a male slender-billed was flying among them. It could’ve happened. It didn’t.

When she visited me again, the focus wasn’t on her last days. In place of her death and the vague but persistent ache that accompanies the realization that you’re alone in this world, I remembered snippets of her life. The warm rush of air as she crossed over the Mediterranean Sea for the ninth time. Cold mud surrounding her beak as she dug for clams on the seashore. A child she had once, a girl. A little ball of fluff balancing on spindly legs. Her beak hadn’t finished growing yet. When she pecked at the ground, the holes weren’t deep enough. But she was learning — that mattered. It still matters, I realize now. You need to know what it was like to groom her downy feathers. How sometimes her head would feel too big for her body and drag her down face first. The little sound she made as she pulled herself back up again. Listen. Can you hear it?

Host Commentary

Afore we begin, a note for the writers in our audience: we are now open again for general submissions! Usual rules apply, check the website for guidelines, ekcetera ekcetera. Except! Oh ho ho! One rule is different this time: instead of being open all month, we’ll be open for six months—all the way through the end of April. We’re testing out a theory that opening for only one month does not, in fact, reduce the number of submissions you get, but only compresses them, so our hope is that opening for longer allows for a more sustainable pattern of reading for our associate editors—which in turn should mean a steadier response time for you, our writers.

Which will not only be a boon to our mental health, but hopefully also yours, as you no longer need to keep track of a hundred moving parts as every market opens and closes for weird and irregular periods of time. Only ninety-nine, now, I suppose. Go back ten years and every market was open all the time, and you could easily bounce a story round till it hopefully found a home: sure, some markets were slower, and you saved them for when you were sick of rejection and needed to give a story a time-out for a while, but you always had options. But now you’re either sitting on your best stories for months, if not years!, waiting for your preferred market to open… or you’re scrabbling around for whatever you have on hand when somewhere announces with a week’s notice that they’re open again for three days and then shut for a further fifteen months, which isn’t ideal for you or, presumably, for the market that ends up getting everyone’s scraps and dregs.

So we’re going to try going back to the old way, see how it works out. Hopefully we don’t get flooded by AI, hopefully we’re not wholly wrong about this and we end up with a deluge of stories that never lets up and we have six times the amount we would have otherwise—but we don’t think that’ll happen, though, so instead of rushing to polish whatever you’ve got in the trunk: take your time. Let the story rest, develop its flavours—or wait to see if that other thing comes back in time, whatever. No rush, right? podcastle.org has all the details, as always, and we are, of course, open for both original stories and reprints.

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush” by Ruth Joffre, and although it was her first time on an Escape Artists podcast—welcome to the family, Ruth!—she has loads of stories linked on her website, ruthjoffre.org including publications at Lightspeed, Augur and khoreo, among others.

Ruth sent us these notes on today’s story: This story was inspired by the news from last year that the slender-billed curlew had gone extinct. It was the first mainland European bird to be declared extinct in 500 years, but I’m sorry to say it’s unlikely to be the last. As a birder, watching species decline over the years has been so heartbreaking. Since 1970, the bird population in North America has declined by three billion breeding adults, and the destruction of natural habitats like forests and prairies is driving many species to the brink. This story was my attempt to process some of that grief and to emphasize that the boundaries between us and other species are much more porous than we think. We all share the same planet. Maybe if we save the birds we can also save ourselves.

Thank you, Ruth, for the notes and the story. There was such an ache to this one, a wordless loss for things you never had the chance to know, things you only learned to love when the moment was already past you.

There’s no point in me listing more statistics for you here. You’ve already heard them in one form or another, numbers so large as to be incomprehensible, effectively meaningless. You know what’s happening, and you know it’s getting worse, and you—like me—feel powerless to stop it. We know it’s being caused by human-driven climate collapse, we know which human activities are doing the driving, we even know what the solutions are! We have the technology right now!

But the selfish idiots in charge don’t care, because it might cost them a fraction of a percent of their nauseating wealth and power. We almost had an agreement on the shipping industry capping its emissions in the past month! Then Saudi Arabia and the US sabotaged it. Fuck the planet, they’ve still got a few billion more to make from their oil reserves first: gotta fund buying out the entire world of sports and videogames somehow, after all, that journalist-murdering, morally-regressive reputation isn’t going to wash itself.

Species extinction is, perhaps, our original sin. The megafauna we hunted till there were none left to find. You’d hope, in fifty thousand years, we might have moved on a little, become a little more conscious of our impact, a little less selfish, a little better as wardens of this world. When Ruth closed her notes today with “maybe if we save the birds we can also save ourselves”, I heard two meanings—not only the usual plea about the interconnectedness of life, the web we rest on that could fray beneath us at any point and leave us in an agricultural apocalypse, but also: if we can learn to want to save the birds, we’ll have saved our souls. We’ll have become the kind of culture that can finally learn to co-exist, to show restraint, to be selfless and thoughtful and understand there is more wealth to be found in life than there could ever be in an oil well. Because if we don’t learn that lesson, we will destroy ourselves long before the destruction we’re inflicting upon the climate can catch up to us.