To be a kid requires difficult detective work. Cash is not a resource I have much of, but my blood type is rare and beautifully oxygenated. I escaped the Surveiller in the conventional way, via a blood bribe. Hood, where I’d spent three weeks camping out and listening to the fuzzy music of a dead vesper sparrow. My pilot friend, Stu, a cheerful alcoholic with a Humming Jet license, had flown me to the Red Zone south of Mt. I did not want to be consumed by it, either. She is a worrier by nature, and I did not want to kindle that fire. I had not mentioned this to Yesenia, my daughter’s mother. I’d had a recent run-in with a Surveiller myself. A single human being now claims to own all the sky that lifts from the Andes to Mars. The sky is what has been colonized in her lifetime-a private highway system branching out of Earth’s shallows into outer space, its imaginary lines conjured into legal reality and policed with blood-red force. My daughter mercifully missed the land grabs and the water wars fought above the rasping aquifers. “What’s it to them if a pair of paunchy loners are out here collecting songs? It’s nothing they can profit from.” “You’d think they’d look the other way,” Popple huffed to me during our spring count. Their employers are paranoid in proportion to the suffering that surrounds them they seem to feel that anyone who casts a shadow in a Red Zone is an “ecoterrorist.” We joke that they must want to keep the escape routes to the moon clear. Once the sky became deeded property, Surveillers started patrolling the hazy air above the lonely scrublands and evaporated lakes. was such a nightmare that the Surveillers left her behind. Orrine was lucky that day in the swamp-she clung to a branch on one of the few living cypress trees, pulling herself up into its saving arms. They won’t hesitate to put a trespasser in a bag. The Surveillers aren’t much for small talk. Popple lost his pinky to a Surveiller’s laser while taking speed photographs of the ghost of a cedar waxwing. Another birder in our network, Suzy, had been held for ransom after being caught by Surveillers in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve while mapping the migration of the resplendent quetzal, a bird that’s lineage dates back forty-nine million years and that has been extinct for the past twenty. Orrine was shot in the former Okefenokee Swamp, while searching for traces of the ivory-billed woodpecker. It would be difficult to escape if the Surveillers took an interest. The school’s eighty-foot brick chimney was the tallest man-made structure for miles. Two milestones for me that dusk: my first visit to the world’s largest known roost of Vaux’s swifts, and my first trip with my daughter post-divorce.

She is turning fourteen in November, and she has never seen a bird offscreen.

My daughter, Starling, looked so small in my viewfinder, struggling under the weight of her spectrograph. I grew up in a town called Eugene, in the shadow of mountains that were unreachable by my third birthday. An evocative name, a name I loved and mispronounced with reverence at age eleven. The school was on the outskirts of a Red Zone in our family’s ancestral breeding grounds-“Oregon” on the older maps, the ones from my boyhood. My daughter had never set foot inside an old-fashioned brick-and-mortar school, and seemed more intrigued by the idea of seeing a chalkboard than by the birds. We were trespassing, but it seemed highly unlikely we’d be caught-the school had been abandoned since the previous century, when ash from the Great Western Fires made most of the region unlivable. I led the way through the woods because I didn’t want my daughter to have her first encounter with the ghost flock alone.

Sweet bird of prey book