Charadrius melodus. Shorebird, skitterer, whistler, watcher.
I do think we all have our bird. If we don’t have a bird, we at least have an animal. If we don’t have even that, then I think what we need, instead, is a good look at life and our place in it. My animal is equally the black bear and the hare, and my bird is the plover. These things I know and these things I think about often because they are who I am and through which I see the world.
Only the piping plover, though, lives in my niche pocket of the world, and only do they live there in the winter. They do not breed here, here being a mere overwinter pit stop along their great migration from The Great Lakes to the Caribbean to all the places in between. Strange to think that a creature so intent upon a particular worm on my particular beach on this particular day in my particular life was once cresting the shore of Lake Superior or riding the gusts above Alberta. To come here, to this small spit of nothing on the southeastern Atlantic coast seems arbitrary. Surely there are greater adventures elsewhere.
But no, it runs from my shadow. Here.
Plovers are then creatures of the winter. I, too, am of winter, although I was born in Spring and have lived in the fiery oven of South Carolina summers my whole life. My genetics dictate otherwise: short, stocky, luminously pale, made for Scottish winters. I melt and fade in the summer. It is a time for hibernation instead of activity. I sleep through the heat of the day and use the (relative) coolness of night as a reprieve to read and write and think. It is in the winter, then, that I reemerge into normal human activity.
Like the plover, too, I skitter. I skitter from one dream to another, from one writing project to the next. I’m writing two novels at once in two very different veins. I write reams of poetry when the evening comes on. Sometimes I think I should up and move to Europe, drink dark coffee and disappear. Other days I throw myself into the fray of where I am and watch humanity in its intricate, delicate exchanges, come home from it all exhausted, start the process over. Kunitz often makes himself known: “I am not done with my changes.”
That the plover is my bird comes at its cost, however. I would have been better off to choose the cardinal or the blue jay or fish crow or the grackle. These and many others stalk the backyards of almost everyone I know. They eat and drop store-bought seed for mourning doves and gray squirrels. Piping Plovers, like so much, are now classified as “threatened” in the southeast. Better off, I suppose, than the Great Lakes plovers who are “endangered.”
Name them and weep: rising tides, erosion, over-development, salinization, the gross disinterest of people moving about their busy lives with heavy thoughts and heavy hearts. It’s hard to think of the environment when the bills arrive. Most people don’t even know about the proposed natural gas plant in the ACE Basin, one of the most biodiverse and fragile ecosystems in the southeast, home to innumerable plovers. Why should they? Those in charge do a damn good job of suppressing it. Progress is progress and it, with death and taxes, is inevitable.
And still, the plover comes.
They run along spits and cuts and inlets toward the outrushing tide where, in brief seconds, they tear up seaworms and spring back as the tide returns. They run-and-pause, they foot tremble. They will do anything to feed. In other words, anything to survive.
And then, when some unknown change in the wind blows its warmer grace, the plovers up and up and there they go –
But they’ll come back. They always do. Please, do.
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It takes great talent far superior than mine to make visual art. I try, and I fail. And so I stopped trying. But I have been infinitely blessed with talented friends who never did give up on those dreams, whose innate abilities as artists shine despite what I would call “the algorithm of consumerism.” They create art because they love it, because they were born to do it, and because they know that without it, there would be no point.
I asked my friend and fellow creative, Payton Mullinax (PM Projects) if she would be willing to foray into new territory and dream up a piping plover to represent my little corner of the internet. She said yes without hesitation. As is who she is, as is what her art is – one big, gigantic, YES to this world. And so now, I have the absolute delight to say that an independent, uncompromising, immensely talented woman has created my little plover – shall I name him? – who will forever and always sit at the corner of my writing.
Thank you, Payton. Thank you infinitely. (Check her out on her instagram: @p.m.projects or on her website).
And, so, my little homage to the piping plover comes to an end. I hope we protect you, little one. If only selfishly, if only because you are a small and flighty part of me.
