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Passer domesticus, western Florida (introduced, year-round)
The day birds started to mean something to Maverick was the day he cleaned a sparrow out of his engine. He hadn’t known it was a sparrow when he found it, going over the post-flight checklist and finding the bird in the engine. What was left of it, at least – calling the mass of bone, blood, and feather still clinging to the machinery a bird was a generous assessment. He’d had a textbook perfect flight, take-off to landing, barely even a stutter as he’d come down from the sky and was back onto the tarmac. He knew it, his instructor Lt. Kelly knew it, and Pete’s mind went blank for a moment, completely forgetting what to do when faced with visible animal remains inside the engine.
“Something wrong?” Kelly asked, knowing a moment was too long to wait.
“I don’t think so, sir,” Pete said.
“You don’t think so. Explain what you mean by that, nice and easy why don’t you.”
“I said I don’t think so because there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the engine except it’s got some snarge in it.”
“Some – let me see.” Pete stood aside for Kelly to take a look. He whistled, close to impressed. “That’s some damn fine snarge all right. First time with it?”
“That’s correct.”
“Bound to happen sooner or later, I managed four years’ flying before I hit anything. You’ve got it out of the way good and early.”
“Thank you.”
Pete knew that a year earlier, they’d have cleaned out the engine without thinking much about it, scraped out the gunk and power-washed off all the remaining blood, and gone about their business of teaching him how to fly airplanes, but the FAA’s new directive on bird strikes was finally in place. Now they needed to go to the trouble of collecting everything they could, scraping up the gunk and gently wiping off the blood, bagging it all up and sending what they’d gathered off to the appropriate collection agency along with the requisite form. Nothing was too much for the Navy to write down, no detail too small and no procedure too obvious to be omitted from written instructions. He wasn’t pioneering a new experimental approach to wildlife-military interactions, he was following a set of rules and instructions already set down for situations like this, and like nearly everything in the military, no matter the branch, it involved its own share of paperwork.
To the FAA’s credit, it was a deeply straightforward form – nothing judgmental about it, taking a just the facts ma’am all we want are the facts approach to bird strikes, asking for things like the species, the location, sky conditions, aircraft registration, engine model, estimated cost of repairs. Pete filled it out as best he could, providing what details he knew and admitting to his ignorance when he didn’t want to guess. On a whim, keeping his handwriting as neat and tidy as he could manage to fill in as many words as he could fit into the Explanation box, he asked if they’d let him know what he’d sent over once they figured it out.
Following the collection and paperwork was a debriefing, followed by the usual evening activities of dinner, study, research, showering, collapsing, and hoping to feel rested in the morning. There wasn’t time for Pete to linger on what’d happened until the next time he was back on the tarmac, watching the ground crew finish their foreign object walkdown with a strange cold queasiness somewhere deep in his guts. They had fences that did a decent job of keeping the tortoises away, and the ones that were determined enough to burrow underneath them were easy to pick up and move safely. Any squirrel brave enough to jump the fence was still smart enough to run when someone approached it. Most birds were easy enough to spook, and if a person running and yelling wasn’t enough, air horns and umbrellas could shoo them away to keep everything clear for the planes.
Like Kelly said, it would’ve happened eventually.
But he found himself looking at what he guessed were sparrows hopping around on the edge of the tarmac. What might have been pigeons or doves strutting around near them, pecking aimlessly at the dirt – seeds, maybe, or bugs – caught his eye in a way they wouldn’t have two days earlier. There weren’t any circling vultures he could spot overhead, or seagulls getting close. Just because they were a reasonably common sight didn’t mean they were guaranteed every day. Just because he didn’t see anything didn’t mean there was nothing around. There was always the chance for a high-flying bird to have the bad luck to get too close before either it or Pete knew they had company.
He pushed forward, grounding himself in the hard reality of going through every point on the pre-flight checklist, making sure of every detail. When he got in the air, he flew better than was asked of him and when it was over, he landed without incident and didn’t flinch when Kelly boomed out his faint praise for not having hit anything this time. Sir yes sir, sir thank you sir, sir no I won’t let something like that scare me out of wanting to keep flying sir, a pity and a shame but it was just a bird sir.
It wasn’t enough to forget what’d happened. Little birds weren’t something that could get easily shooed off the runway ahead of time, not like the way a heron or a flock of geese could be scattered by someone walking towards them without flinching. From a cockpit, a little bird was invisible unless it landed right on top of him or collided with his canopy mid-flight. It wasn’t easy to keep an eye out for a hazard that small. It wasn’t easy to put it out of his mind, either.
Three weeks later, on the cusp of graduation, Pete got a letter from the Smithsonian’s natural history museum. It was addressed directly to him from a Dr. F. R. Hughes, and something about it made him want to read it alone. When he opened the envelope that night, he found one neatly typed page.
Dear LT JG Mitchell, First, I have to thank you for getting complete feathers. It makes our job a lot easier over here. Usually it’s more of a mess, like the second bag you sent us, and that makes it a lot more of a challenge to figure out what we’re dealing with when it comes to human-bird interactions like that. What you hit was a very unlucky house sparrow. It wasn’t something rare or endangered, which means you don’t need to worry about that, in case you were concerned. It also means that if you kept any feathers for yourself, you can keep them. If you hit an eagle or a migrating swift, we’d have to ask you – we the official government people, not we the Smithsonian people – to either get rid of them or send them to the office. But even common sparrows are important to keep in mind when it comes to making sure our Navy’s jets are safely flying. We’ve contacted the base’s commanding officer about it and we’ll be using this information as best we can, and I hope this reaches you in good health and that it doesn’t happen again. Yours, Dr Felicity Hughes
He realized he hadn’t expected it to be a sparrow, and now that he knew, he couldn’t imagine thinking it’d been anything else. He thought of sending Dr. Hughes a letter back, Thank you for letting me know what I hit, I already went over the strike with the officers but it’s nice to get specifics. If she’d mailed it off a few days later, the letter would probably have been rerouted off to Corpus Christi and there wasn’t any guessing how much longer it’d have taken to get to him.
Pete knew however long it was before he got Hughes’ letter, he wouldn’t have forgotten the strike.
All he’d felt was a sharp, hard stutter that didn’t stop him from keeping control of the plane and executing a perfect landing. It hadn’t been terrifying, it hadn’t been scary, it hadn’t been dangerous. It hadn’t even been the most disgusting thing he’d seen that day. But it’d rattled him, unsettled him, knowing it was because of something far outside anyone’s control – as much as they could work to keep birds out of the way, there wasn’t the guarantee of that. He’d been lucky all he’d felt was that stutter. There wasn’t any keeping house sparrows away from people, at least not according to the bird guide he’d skimmed in the half-hour of free time he’d manage to scrounge together to visit the base library the next day. They lived where people lived, tucking their nests up where he couldn’t see them but could spot them flying home, or poking their heads out to survey the area before taking off. Small holes, tiny ledges, the occasional bit of exposed pipe. As nests went, they weren’t nearly as particular as Florida scrub jays: if they saw an opportunity, they grabbed onto it with all eight claws.
Dangerous as they were, he could admire that in a bird.
-
Geococcyx californianus, southeast Texas (native, year-round)
“You see that?” Maverick asked Goose, nodding his head at a burst of movement too fast to make out in a dry, open patch of Texan dirt. The roadrunner stopped for a moment, then went back to its dust bath. “They do it to keep clean. It helps knock the bugs out of their feathers.”
Goose pushed out a croaking laugh. “I still can’t get over how they’re real. I know the cartoon had to come from something, but you get out here and see one, and you think, there’s no way. There can’t be any way.”
“Were you in Pensacola when they had that flamingo on base?” Goose shook his head. “One showed up my second week, we all ran to see it, even the COs. We’re pretty sure a rainstorm tossed our way. This one guy, Helprin, he took a picture of it because he knew nobody’d believe him otherwise.” Maverick let out a quiet laugh. “You want a bird you can’t believe, it’s a flamingo. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen them, it doesn’t matter they’re from Florida, you see one outside of a zoo, you see it and you think there’s no way that’s what you’re seeing.”
“I believe it,” Goose said. Something flickered on his face; Maverick was starting to recognize that expression of a memory floating up. “There was this one time I saw an osprey do this amazing move that I’d never seen a bird do before.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I saw one dive down, hit the water, grab a fish right out of there all nice and easy,” he swooped a hand through the air to illustrate, making a plucking gesture and rising back up, “and it turned the fish face-on, right into the wind. Not just holding onto it, but pointing it with its feet so it was more aerodynamic.” He ran a hand down the nose of their jet. “I know nobody taught it that. Like how sheepdogs don’t need to get trained to round up sheep. They just know how to do it.”
“Instinct, yeah.” Maverick traced his eyes along the outline of the plane against the stark Texas sky. “I’ve never seen one do that. You’re lucky you saw it happen.”
“Right place, right time,” Goose said, his smirk belying his humility. Maverick shot him a smile in return.
The jet was engineered to the best of human capability with the most advanced technology America had to offer the world, a wonderful piece of machinery capable of 453 knots and rudder triplets. It stood waiting and ready to take a crack at gravity, to fulfill its promise of the sky. It held flight inside of it, and Maverick ran his bare hand along the sun-warmed fuselage. People had spent thousands of hours figuring out the best possible curves for the engines, the most efficient angles for the wings, minimizing drag and maximizing lift, probably a minimum four pages of requirements for the UHF switches alone. All that work to get into the air – and somewhere deep inside themselves, from a place beyond what any mechanical engineer could imagine, ospreys simply knew how they needed to hold a fish to best move through the sky.
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Larus glaucescens, coast of southern California (native, year-round)
It didn’t take many weeks on an open ocean with nothing but horizon to make pretty much anything that showed up a welcome sight. It didn’t take many dolphins for them to lose their novelty while never losing any pleasure in spotting them. Same with whales, whether they were breathing or breaching. The handful of times it’d been a pod, everyone raced to the flight deck to take in the sight of so many of them at once. Sometimes the angle and speed were right to catch a good look at a high-flying fish or a large enough school of something or other to make out the movement, and there wasn’t a single F-14 pilot on board who didn’t swear he’d seen a shark out on the open water at least one time with his RIO always backing him up.
In his last letter, Ice recounted how Slider said he’d seen one, and Maverick was slightly more willing to trust that a Top Gun-winning team was telling him the truth.
Deployments meant some of the greatest sunrises and sunsets he could imagine, night skies that beggared belief with all the stars, and even though leaving those behind always ached, that ache was always soothed at the first sight of a tree and faces he hadn’t gotten used to seeing a dozen times a day and a chance to be alone for a little while. He wasn’t one of those men who’d swear he knew they were getting close to port just from the smell and feel of the air alone, but there were other ways that went beyond what the instruments had to say.
“Seagull!” Maverick called out. “We got a seagull here!”
“Where?” Merlin asked, and followed Maverick’s finger. “There it is. Nice, nice. It won’t be long now.” Maverick grunted out something, more concerned with trying to see if he could make out any details at a distance.
Then Merlin said something, and he had to ask him to say it again.
“Do you think it’s a Western?”
“Maybe. It wouldn’t surprise me, we’re in the right region for it, the right season, but white body, dark wings, that’s not a lot to go on.”
“Could be a Herring,” Merlin offered, voice light with the joke of the near impossibility of being able to tell them apart.
“Could be a Herring,” Maverick allowed, matching his tone.
“What is it?” Goldenrod asked.
“Seagull,” Maverick and Merlin said together.
It took him a moment, and Maverick heard his little happy grunt when he spotted it too. “There he is! There’s the guy!”
“It could be a female,” Merlin said. “No way to tell from here. So maybe there she is.”
“Maybe, maybe. It’s still a little guy, though,” Goldenrod said. “You know, like how an animal’s always a little guy.”
“They’re all little guys until you can tell,” Merlin said. “We can’t from here, so I guess I’ve got to say there’s the guy.”
They all watched the bird catch the air in its feathers a moment, and Goldenrod asked, “Can you tell what kind it is?”
“Not easily,” Maverick told him. “Binoculars would help, but past a point –”
“I heard someone tell me if you can ID gulls, that’s the black belt of birdwatching,” Merlin said. “It’s got a white body, black wings, black tail, at this point where we are’s the best way to guess what it might be.”
“So…not a pelican?” Goldenrod joked.
“I think we can say it’s not a pelican,” Maverick said. Goldenrod hummed, stared, and left him and Merlin to another minute of birdwatching before it caught a current and flew off. “You know your birds pretty well,” Maverick told his three-month RIO.
“I should, I’ve got them to thank for my callsign.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. There was this one time at Meridian I ID’d a vireo and someone asked me if I was a wizard or something, a wizard birdwatcher, like…you know.” He kept his eyes out on the water, barely smiling even with his voice easy and pleased. “I think I cemented it when I told them a merlin’s a bird, too.”
“Pigeonhawk,” Maverick said without hesitation.
“That’s the one.”
“One of the smaller raptors.”
“One of the littlest.”
“Did they know that before or after you told them?”
Merlin stared out at the ocean. His silence answered Maverick’s question for him, who didn’t hold in his laughter.
-
Apus apus, eastern Iraq (native, breeding)
Overseas and at home, sparrows enjoyed a good bath. They made their nests up in little spots around the base people had made for them without meaning to, small corners and undisturbed ledges, and if Maverick stood quietly near one when the chicks were newly hatched, he’d be rewarded with a few gentle chirps. It wasn’t a standardized audiologist approved hearing test, and he found it worked pretty well as a general assessment of how he was doing.
Sparrows calling out to each other didn’t sound all that different to him from when they were coordinating a good bath, a good meal, or mobbing a corvid or a raptor. Even far overseas, deep in Iraq, house sparrows didn’t have an accent he could pick out. It made him wonder if it was something beyond what humans could hear without special equipment, and if a sparrow from the States would be understood right away or if it’d need time to adjust to the local dialect.
Talking about birds was a way to say something that wasn’t about why he was there, even if it wasn’t total freedom from the censors and investigative brass. Maverick knew mentioning certain species could identify where he was in the world, which was something that wouldn’t fly, and if he was writing to Iceman instead of Carole and Bradley, a little extra concern didn’t hurt. But he could tell Iceman about sparrows mobbing a hawk because that happened everywhere there were sparrows and hawks, and know Iceman would understand he wasn’t just telling him about the sparrows. He could tell him the coffee wasn’t bitter enough for his taste and know he’d understand Maverick was telling him how much he missed sharing a bed with him. Whether he signed as Maverick or Mav or Pete or Mitchell told his boyfriend how much danger he’d recently been in without alerting anyone or opening himself up to disclosing specific deployment patterns.
If Iceman wrote back, his letters would have questions about the local pigeons and if they acted any differently – another bird that followed humans along, because humans always brought them along for the ride the way America brought itself around the world. He’d ask Maverick if he was aware of the poetry of sparrows mobbing crows and crows mobbing raptors, and that all sparrows everywhere didn’t know when to stop picking fights, and Maverick knew he was saying he was dealing with his own logistical headaches about international diplomatic policy as best he could manage. Ice could tell him he’d started wondering if pigeons had accents, since they were a globally positioned species that presumably all spoke the same pigeon language, and be certain Maverick would understand he was saying he wished he could be there with him. He’d sign it Iceman or Ice or Kazansky or Tom and Maverick’s heart ached differently for each name.
Calling out to each other in ways that other people couldn’t understand.
A letter to Carole or Bradley had just as many chances to fuck up and have them end up getting something with words or passages censored out – his mother had received one letter from his father where the words hadn’t just been blacked out but removed, physically cut out of the paper. It hadn’t been possible to guess what had filled the space, and Maverick wished he knew what’d happened to it. To keep that kind of mystery out of their life, he talked about missing long showers, how people in the region drank tea out of glass cups, that he loved them and thought about them often, and that while most of the birds were different, the sparrows and pigeons were the same here, too.
“What couldn’t you share with us when you were overseas?” Carole asked, going right for it as Maverick took in her living room, colorful and warmly decorated. Her house was as modest as his own, a two-bedroom-two-bathroom cozy kitchen kind of place, with the biggest difference that her second bedroom was in full-time use instead of staying in reserve for friends. It had more signs of life than his own, also: the framed watercolor prints, the bookshelves with more than just reference materials, Bradley. He was presently taking his responsibility of steeping tea seriously, counting the three minutes down to the second on his little wristwatch.
“Nothing important. I missed you two, I missed Ice, I’m happy to be back for a while.” He watched Bradley lift the strainer out of the pot, tapping it gently to release the last drops, and set it aside on its own little plate. “It’s true I didn’t mention a couple things I didn’t want anyone knowing about until I got here.”
“Like the cups?” Bradley asked as Carole poured the tea into the glass cups Maverick had managed to bring back without a single scratch or chip.
“Yeah, like the cups,” Maverick said. As they drank the tea, sweet and bitter, they chatted about Bradley’s classmates, the Presidio’s ongoing demilitarization, Carole’s local gossip that had the novelty of coming from a civilian’s outsider perspective. There was a lot she couldn’t say, and the simple observations that came from talking to other parents and fellow HR employees and putting two and two together to get four was probably more than she ought to say, but in her living room, it could easily be excused as rampant speculation and dismissible rumors. Whatever the state of California was doing with its old missile silos wasn’t something being shared with her, so she couldn’t offer any specifics, just that certain people were being sent to certain cities within the Bay Area and other towns up and down the coast.
“But that’s just what I hear at work,” she said. “I’m sure if you asked your bosses about it, you’d hear exactly the same things.”
“If not less.”
“If not less,” she echoed, wryly.
Bradley had finished his tea before either of the adults in the room, and a cup of green tea wasn’t too much for them, but it had him fidgeting and eager to show Maverick what was new in the backyard, take him by the hand and give him a tour of the wild areas behind the houses, pointing out the spot where he’d seen a snake and the tree the local magpies liked and where he’d tried to run after a jackrabbit. He told him about playing hide-and-seek in an open field when all the fog came in, and demonstrated how well he could ride his bike. He preened like his father when he said he could get just about anywhere on the base by himself now that he had a bike without training wheels.
It took a couple hours to tire him out, and it made Maverick’s heart lighter to see him so happy.
When he was ready to sit still again, up in his room, Maverick made him promise to keep quiet before showing him his own private, secret gift.
He’d wrapped the glossy feathers in leftover plastic bags to keep out any moisture, set those between salvaged cardboard to keep them from getting bent, wrapped everything up in some old t-shirts and kept it all safe at the bottom of his luggage. He didn’t know what birds the feathers came from, just that they were probably from the same bird and that it was bigger than a sparrow. Flight feathers, all three of them, eight inches long tip to tip, brown like the exposed dirt of the Central Valley and curved gently to catch the wind and carry the bird along. Maverick hadn’t looked up what the possible charges might be for international feather smuggling. As Bradley held one of the feathers gently between his thumb and forefinger, eyes focused and curious, he knew it was worth all the effort and risk to bring them over.
“See how it’s curved?” Bradley nodded. “It’s perfectly evolved for flight. When the feather’s curved, when a wing’s curved like these feathers, air moves farther when it’s going over the top. It’s also moving faster on top than on the bottom, which means there’s less air pressure on top. Having more pressure below the feather means there’s lift, which means there’s flight.” Bradley flicked the feather back and forth, back and forth, as serious a look on his face as any child had ever worn. “You know you can’t show these to anyone,” Maverick reminded him. “They’re just for you and your mom.”
“I know,” Bradley said. “Thank you.” He held the feather up, turning it this way and that. “It’s the same with planes? The way air goes over the wings.”
“Yes. Not exactly the same because they don’t have feathers, but yes, it’s the same thing of pressure and lift for flight.”
Bradley nodded again, his eyes on the feather in his hand, and Maverick could tell his mind was going somewhere only wings could take him.
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Amazona ochrocephala, District of Columbia (domesticated, N/A)
“You’ve been – I mean, what was the first time you hit something?”
“It would’ve been 1981,” Maverick said. “A house sparrow on the runway got into my engine. It wasn’t anything exciting like a red-tailed hawk colliding with the canopy, but it made an impression.”
Dr. Angie whistled low. “I can imagine.”
“I won’t say I was lucky to have it happen early, but someone told me it was good to have it happen just as I was starting out.” He tried to drag up Kelly’s words as best he could. “He said it wasn’t so much getting it out of the way or dealing with it first thing, but knowing it’s a thing that can happen because it happened to you.” Three times over nearly twenty years was three times more than he wanted, and compared to the other three direct hits he’d made, he knew which kind weighed easier on his mind.
Maverick never liked sending the Smithsonian collection samples and federal forms, but he’d never been unhappy when he’d heard back from them. He didn’t usually have reason to get in touch with the Lab outside of strikes and snarge, but he’d looked at his leave schedule and the museum’s open days, checked with Charlie and a couple other people he wanted to see in DC, made a couple of phone calls and sent some emails to be certain, and was deeply thankful that the kind of people who spent their days teasing out the fine details of barbules were ready and eager to talk about their work with anyone who’d listen.
Dr. Angela-call-me-Angie Hendricks had been genuinely happy to see him. “Most people don’t come to see where their samples go,” she said, leading him through a lab that struck him for all the world as nearly a dead ringer for Bradley’s high school chemistry classroom, just with more white tiles and no windows. The overhead lights, the work stations, the microscopes, the jars and bottles and folders and the boxes of blue latex gloves – it was all surprisingly familiar. Maybe after a certain point, every lab ended up looking the same. Angie showed him around, introduced him to her co-workers and her bosses, talking through the different procedures and processes. She was always pleased when he had a question or already knew what she was talking about. She gave him a demonstration of barbule teasing and walked him through DNA sampling, and he got the sense she would’ve let him do some pipetting if he asked nicely.
Then she took him into the specimen collection.
He’d been in floor-to-ceiling collections before, mostly when he’d been doing research for his Master’s degree, and the specimen room looked nearly the same until Angie opened a drawer and it hit him that the room wasn’t housing papers and photos.
“How many per drawer?” He asked. “On average?”
“It depends. You can fit more finches to a drawer than herons, some drawers are bigger than others. I can tell you it’s always at least one bird per drawer. The total collection’s about 650,000 individual specimens.”
In other words, a hell of a lot of birds. He tried to count the number of drawers from floor to ceiling and estimate the number of columns to the back of the room, then decided against it. “Is there a bird people usually ask to see when they come in?”
“There aren’t enough people that come for tours for there to be any usual birds.” She blinked, thinking. “I’d say if we have anything extinct. There’s a few, but we don’t use them much.”
“You wouldn’t have many reasons to, no,” Maverick said, looking at his guide instead of the drawers.
“If we had to, it might not be that bad. I mean – well, it wouldn’t be great, but you know what I mean.”
“Verification there’s some Carolina parakeets still out there.”
“That, yes. It’d blow all the discreditable ivory billed sightings out of the water. Hey, c’mon, let me show you my favorite section,” she said, guiding him along to the hummingbirds. He could appreciate how she liked them for how they almost never came in, not even from small private airports, and how that made it bittersweet to have to visit the specimens, but in a way she appreciated.
Over lunch, both Charlies seemed impressed at that. Charlie-from-Charles nodded politely as Maverick recounted the color of the hummingbird feathers, ruffling his own in response. Charlie-from-Charlotte laughed when he told her about the issues with identifying different corvids and how geography was one of the first things the lab took into consideration to narrow things down for jay species.
“There’s some birds that –”
“How you doing?”
“I’m good,” Maverick said to Charlie-from-Charles, same as he always did. He turned back to Charlie-from-Charlotte, “You were saying?”
“I was saying what you were saying, how with some birds there’s such a limited range anything outside of that’s a reason for a lot of attention.”
“It’s happened a few times. Angie told me –”
“Fill up a burn bag,” Charlie said, not enjoying being left out and demonstrating why he wasn’t allowed into places with security clearances.
Charlie sighed and set her coffee down. “I had an analyst from the company over for dinner a few weeks ago. I don’t know why that’s what he picked up from her but for whatever reason, it’s stuck around.”
“It’s cute,” Maverick said, as she went to get her parrot. “Of course you can’t tell me what you talked about.” She shook her head. “What about you?”
“Hands, hands,” Charlie said to Charlie as she cradled him on her lap, sidestepping the question. He chirruped quietly as she scratched his neck, and did the same for Maverick when he got a turn to pet him.
It was good to see them both in high spirits – with summer, it was easy for the two of them to go out and take long walks – and he gave each Charlie a kiss before heading out. The Charlies’ apartment was in Dupont Circle so getting to Ice’s apartment across the river would take a while, but he wasn’t in a hurry. DC wasn’t a tourist destination for late July the way it was for the start of the month, which gave Maverick nearly full run of the sidewalks and paths. He pushed his hands into his pockets and took a long-cut back through the Mall, enjoying the breezes from the water cutting through the worst of the humidity. It was just him, if he didn’t count the geese. The ones by the water nibbling their way across the lawn were probably some of the year-round residents, not a migrating flock. Any goslings were long since grown up, but molting season had everyone looking a little awkward, even well past adolescence. They honked quietly as Maverick approached, walking carefully to avoid the guano, and they slowly waddled away and slipped into the water to paddle off and leave him to gather up some feathers. He inspected them carefully, looking for good specimens free of gunk or blood or down.
He didn’t show them to Ice right away, not when he got roped into a kiss the moment he was through the door. But as soon as he leaned away and pulled them out, setting them down on the table, Ice got a sharp twinkle in his eyes.
“Should I be concerned about this?”
“I thought I’d send them to Sarah. See about implicating her in a host of Federal violations.”
“Casting a shade upon what goodwill I’ve worked to build for my family’s name. Not on your life.” Ice didn’t laugh, but the twinkle remained. “Besides, you shouldn’t involve the post office in an elaborate, premeditated conspiracy. A plan like that’s going to get you coming and going. No, I don’t mind if you try to skirt international treaties in the privacy of my home, God knows I’ve committed enough federal violations in my time –” Maverick shoving him into the living room and down onto the couch got a laugh at last. A laugh, and another kiss, gentler this time.
“You could keep a couple of the primaries,” Maverick said quietly. “Maybe a vase by a window.”
“Maybe,” Tom allowed. “That, I might. I probably won’t keep them for long, but maybe.”
“Wait.” Maverick reared up and pulled out one last feather, smaller than all the rest. “This one you don’t have to worry about.”
“Ah!” He smiled, turning the plush green tail feather over in the air, seeing it catch the light. Charlie was grandfathered in from the pet trade and didn’t molt frequently, but what intact feathers fell out in their due course were always beautiful. “I’ll be honest, I probably won’t keep this one, either. But the vase by the window idea’s looking more attractive.”
Maverick leaned back down onto Tom, running his hand along his arm to wrap his fingers around his own, the two of them holding the tail feather. “Ms. Blackwood sends her regards.” Tom gave him a low, pleased murmuring sound. “Mr. Blackwood, also. Charlie showed me the new harness she got for him. Said it’s nice to take him out in it because it’s got more of a lead, and he’s gotten a hang of flying with that much slack.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Good to hear,” Tom said, running his fingers through Maverick’s hair, holding him in close.
-
Zenaida asiatica, Mojave Desert (native, breeding)
In eleventh grade, Bradley’s capstone report for his AP biology class was a paper on involuntary parks. It was an expansion on his eighth-grade science fair entry, an elaborate presentation on Lemoore and its biodiversity. How areas kept free of humans after their removal, or areas where humans weren’t allowed to go, developed back into rich havens for wildlife. For his report, he’d done his reading and then some, having Maverick take him to college libraries to get his hands on primary sources about the Zone of Exclusion and the Korean DMZ, and he’d gone out into fields in town and the areas surrounding the base to gather fresh data on the number of animal and plant species to better work his graphs. He’d had Tom read the report for notes and corrections and accepted the words written in red pen without any anger or annoyance, just an understanding of the work he’d knowingly asked for. Maverick had read it before he’d turned it in and hadn’t had nearly as much to say – he’d seen that Tom and Bradley had both done a good job. He didn’t tell either of them that the report had been his introduction to the term involuntary park. Not the concept; just the term. You couldn’t collect entries for your birding life list on military bases and not grasp the concept right away.
He knew learning which birds came through at what times of year was only one factor in figuring out how to keep birds far away from the planes. Sometimes it was as straightforward as upping sanitation standards for trash disposal or blasting disco music, or altering the landscaping techniques to make the immediately adjacent areas less hospitable and encourage them to raise their chicks on the far side of the base well away from any jet engines. With some birds, there wasn’t any such thing as a permanent solution. The ones that were too smart for their own good, who knew how to hang around and also avoid the planes and teach their babies how to do such things themselves. Every time he saw a bird – a starling, a pigeon, a sparrow – manage to land on a plane, the cockpit, the tailfin, the edge of the wings, it stirred something inside of him that he couldn’t name.
“You don’t have a chicken gun, do you?” Dr. Helen Duncan asked, bagging up the snarge left over from a pigeon-sized bird colliding with Maverick’s canopy as he filled out the strike form. All he’d seen was that it was pigeon-sized, brown, and headed his way. “I can’t help but think – I know there’s the Air Force’s but it can’t be that hard to bash one together, can it? There’s no getting around collisions like this and making sure you’ve also got controlled circumstances to measure against is a good thing.” She sealed the bag, checked it again, and brought out her little sea turtle shaped bottle of hand sanitizer, something that she’d said No man’s going to ask to borrow it and it’s easy to remember if I have it with me.
“If we had one of those around, you can bet your sweet ass you’d have heard about it,” Maverick said. “It’s not like the locations of the training towns out in the mountains or the Trinity cages.”
“The Trinity what?”
“You don’t have clearance to know about those.” He looked up at Duncan and her wide eyes. “Much less what was in them.”
“Okay, now I know you’re joking with me.”
“If you want to believe that.” In the Remarks (other inquires) section, he kept his handwriting as tidy as he could to fit in his wish for Angie and the rest of the staff at the Lab to have a happy Thanksgiving.
Duncan looked around, seemingly satisfied. “Is that everything?”
“You might’ve missed a few molecules,” he said as dry as he could manage, “but probably not.” She gave a small high-pitched laugh, and apparently it was a good enough joke that she invited him to help out with the last banding checks of the season. He’d only learned about it after his first hand-holding tour – it made sense as a way to do things, just not as something he’d ever thought about. Binoculars could only go so far. He’d pitched in with banding a few times, and always took it as a pleasure. Holding the specimens carefully as they were freed from the nets, letting the scientists jot down their notes with their pencils and clipboards, soaking in the feeling of the feathers and the warmth in his hands.
Every migration season, Maverick watched the birds come through, and he tallied them up for Bradley in letters he’d never send, always trying to figure out how best to tell him what he’d seen most recently and what was coming through this year. How here was more practical vindication of his hypothesis and that even being in close proximity to experimental jets was still better and safer for them during their long journeys than a lot of other options as they flew north to south, south to north, finding the bases a good place to stop and rest for a while. He wrote how Duncan kept arguing for more native grasses around the residential parts of the base and that she knew nobody would ever go for it, not with present military housing landscaping standards, and somehow enjoying running up against a brick wall every time. She always explained to anyone who’d listen that native plants would only help more with keeping the birds at a distance from the jets, that ripping out the lawns would bring songbirds right to your bedroom windows and give you something beautiful to look at in the morning.
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Pelecanus occidentalis, southern California (native, year-round)
Bird strikes overwhelmingly happened during either take-off or landing for the simple fact that most birds didn’t get high enough to hit fighter jets. Low-altitude flights came in just behind take-offs and landings, with fall and spring migrations causing the most activity and increasing the risk. Keeping birds away from the runways was a start and making sure everything was clear helped with that, and the blindingly obvious thing about birds was there wasn’t any keeping them out of the sky.
There was a thin strip of remains along Maverick’s canopy that didn’t have enough mass to be called snarge and didn’t have any feathers in it to ease the identification process. The adrenaline hadn’t worn off when he landed, still shaking, wound up high and sharp, taking a moment to get his bearings while seated on the ground. When he’d spotted the smear, something unwound in him, forcing relief into his heart. Forty years earlier, someone would have wiped the canopy clean and that would’ve been the end of it. As he waited in the hospital, he knew there was someone carefully collecting a sample, dabbing the canopy with an oversized Q-Tip to get as much as they could. Collecting a bird strike sample was a simple thing to do, a straightforward task, something he almost wished he was doing because it wasn’t more waiting. Even filling out the form would’ve been something better to think about than what state Phoenix and Bob might be in.
The thin strip was all there was to work with. There sure as shit wasn’t any collecting anything from the crash, which meant the need to be as thorough as possible with what little there was available. Hopefully enough to get into a pipette and under a microscope, enough to be run through a centrifuge, enough to be fed into a sequencer. Not that it mattered what it’d been. Except for how it was someone’s job to find out. Except for how finding out the species was always the first step in trying to stop it from happening again.
Even if there wasn’t any way to promise that.
Some four weeks later – four of the longest, most intense weeks of his life – he found out that the Lab had received more than enough to do the tests they needed to positively identify the culprit species.
It was the kind of thing best shared in person, with or without a stiff drink. Phoenix and Bob went for beers, with Maverick opting to follow their lead. Sitting outside, the winds off the ocean coming in chilly as December settled in, he idly wished he’d gone for an Irish Coffee. Penny made them with more than enough Navy-strength coffee to counterbalance the whiskey, very little sugar, and enough cream to make sure they’d go down easy. She made them dangerous, and maybe he’d go inside and get one after he was done with his beer.
Before they could get impatient, he laid it out for them, how there’d been a slight collision on his end that’d produced enough material for the Lab. Phoenix nodded. “Real CSI of them.”
“So, what was it?” Bob asked.
“Brown pelicans,” Maverick said.
They stared at him for a moment. He kept his hand around his half-drunk beer, letting the information settle in.
“Pelicans,” Phoenix echoed. “Like those.” She jerked her head to indicate the birds down the beach.
“Exactly like those,” Maverick said.
“Oh,” Bob said quietly. He moved to drink, his lips twitching, then put down his beer before pressing his face into his hand and starting to laugh. He started, and kept going, laughing harder and harder as Maverick and Phoenix watched him long enough for Maverick to take another pull of his beer, and he kept laughing.
“You mind sharing with the class?” Phoenix asked.
He composed himself long enough to say, “It’s that…” He took a few deep breaths in between the laughs and tried again, “It’s that brown pelicans aren’t endangered.” He shook his head, took a sip, and let out a low sigh. “It was awful, and terrifying, and if you look at it right it’s pretty funny that a pelican can take down a fighter jet like that. We survived everything and it was a fucking pelican that took us out, you got shot with a SAM, that’s almost – almost noble, but we, Phoenix and I, we hit a fucking pelican and we go down.” Maverick nodded, Phoenix murmured something indistinct, and Bob took another deep breath. “Plus. Besides that, as terrible as it was,” he cut off, laughing again. Maverick took another sip of beer and waited, patiently. He’d seen plenty of people fall into helpless laughter long after the fact when the full weight of the moment finally hit them and didn’t rush Bob. He watched him force himself to calm down, picking up where he left off, “As terrible as it was, at least it wasn’t an endangered species. There’s probably an extra form for that and I filled out enough forms about the strike already, I don’t need another one. God, losing a fighter jet to a bird strike’s bad enough but losing a fighter jet and killing a rare protected bird at the same time, that’d be everything going wrong on every possible level in every possible way.”
Phoenix stared at him. She nodded, took a drink, and looked off towards the ocean with a distant stare. Maverick knew that look from too many pilots to name. She shook her head, then let out a soft giggle, a sound that struck Maverick as one she probably didn’t let herself make very often. “You’re not wrong. That’d be the insult to the injury. It’s not your fault everything went wrong, and you made the right call to eject because there wasn’t any saving it, and we’re also down one more rare bird in the world, and that’s terrible.” She giggled again, smiling, and her eyebrows went up as something occurred to her. “Hey, if they’re not endangered – I know you didn’t get any feathers, but if you had, could we have kept them? Like as a trophy.”
Maverick shook his head, and both of them slumped their shoulders, dejected and disappointed. “I already checked and it’s not one of the migratory bird treaty exceptions.” He took a quick sip of beer to give himself a moment for effect. He’d learned a thing about timing in his life, maybe even two. “If it’d been a great white or a pinked back, then you could’ve taken some home with you. Even though none of them survived the crash, you could go pick some up from the beach, clean them off, set up a window display.” He took another moment, took another drink of beer, and pushed forward, knowing he could let the grief come through for him to feel later. “But browns are still under the treaty, so no luck there.”
“It wouldn’t be worth the risk,” Phoenix said. “The Smithsonian needs them more than we’d want them. And you know Fish and Wildlife doesn’t mess around.”
“You know I know,” Maverick agreed.
“Also, where would we put them?” Bob said. “We’d be carrying them around, so that’s trafficking on top of the rest of the charges.” Phoenix pushed out a more military-sounding laugh, and Maverick nodded.
“Either of you want another?” He gestured at their bottles. They both did, and when they saw his Irish Coffee, both clearly knew they’d made the wrong call. It burned just right from the warmth and the whiskey, bringing up good memories – a couple that he even let himself share with the two naval aviators sitting across from him, making them laugh again for much finer, kinder reasons.
-
Artemisiospiza belli, southern California (native, year-round)
Goose, bless his memory, had known the name of every star in every constellation. The Mojave was the only place Maverick had been that got a night sky that came anywhere close to what he’d seen on aircraft carriers out on the open ocean, and whenever he managed to piece together Cassiopia or the Unicorn, his heart ached a little less. Knowing Rooster had blocked out two weeks in August to come see the Perseids had him out most nights with a telescope and guidebook, working to commit names to stars.
Late spring was the desert’s most verdant time, a frenzy of growth after the winter rains, everything pushing out fresh leaves and new flowers with every animal rushing to follow along for as long as the leaves and flowers lasted. There were coyotes howling all through the year and it was only in late spring that Maverick heard the pups calling out along with their parents. With his good binoculars and cultivated patience, he could watch jackrabbits boxing, hummingbird courtship displays, burrowing owls pop up out of the ground and take off running. Not many animals chose to live close to the hangar – as territory and threat displays went, his bikes were the biggest, loudest ones for miles around – but it didn’t take much walking to get to where the wild life started and the point at which people stopped giving him grief about his boots.
Of the animals that did get close, beyond making sure small mammals didn’t move in and start chewing up the wiring, he kept an eye out for the tortoises to make sure they crossed roads safely and didn’t start nesting nearby. He kept an eye out for the bats when they’d come out of their nests and take over the night, dark shapes moving against dark skies. The hanger was too far removed from the nearest town for human-adjusted birds to settle in the roof, and if he hadn’t been by for a while, whether it was days or weeks, there’d usually be a few fairly brazen quail pecking around the edges of the runway.
Whenever he stayed there for a stretch, whether it was days or weeks, it made the sight of common urban birds remarkable again.
Pointing that out to Tom as he watched the assorted little brown birds – sparrows, juncos, a couple of wrens – take their morning dust baths in the backyard had Tom look at him askance, very much his are you going somewhere with these blindingly obvious insights face. Maverick shrugged, offering his own as blindingly obvious as it might be I’m still going to point it out for the sake of drawing attention to something I think is worth a moment of your time look. Tom sighed, dramatically put-upon, and took the kettle’s whistle as cue to move on with his life. Maverick stayed at the window a few more minutes, letting the sounds of Tom making tea score the bathing going on outside. Steeping the leaves, grooming tails. Getting mugs out, moving faster than the naked eye could see. Handing him a mug done as he liked, deciding they were clean enough and took off to see to their daily business. He was fairly sure they were the ones he’d spotted nesting at the western corner of the garage. In the mug, the milk and the malt were perfect, and he sipped it slowly.
For all that people had brought sparrows along with them and then decided they were too much trouble to deal with, the little birds seemed to be doing all right.
Maybe he could put a small fountain in by the hanger, one of those little bubblers nature centers liked to use. See what else came by when he was out there. Install some nesting boxes and bat boxes while he was at it, find out what bird species needed homes most and go about providing them.
Not that city birds didn’t benefit from a safe place to sleep, either. He took another sip, thought a moment, and asked, “What do you think of pigeon racing?”
Tom didn’t answer with a silence that went far beyond simply getting the ingredients to cook them both breakfast. Maverick watched him warm up the beans and eggs in the skillet, sliced avocado on the side for himself and pico de gallo for Maverick with dark rye toast for them both, not quite full-on Mexi-Slavic but close thanks to the herbs he’d used in the beans. Finally, he asked, “In general?”
“As a hobby. Something to do with the days. Or just a coop for a flock, no racing, just birds.” Tom glanced up and went right back to the beans. Maverick kept going, “It’d have to be here, obviously – a coop out in the desert, they’d all get eaten in a matter of days. Here there’s still falcons, hawks, but they wouldn’t be nearly at much at risk.”
“Make sure they have a place to come home to,” Tom said, reading his mind as he set the plates on the table.
Maverick smiled. “The most important thing.”