The bottom quarter of Sammy’s
sweatpants were stained dark with dew and mottled with mud. He trudged ahead,
cold, head scrunched into his hood, left hand pocketed, right hand cradling the
GPS that guides us on our transect. A slender Red Maple branch, waylaid by his
shoulder, sprang back and stung my cheek. “Ouch!” I cried.
“Sorry,
dude,” he mumbled. We walked on, pushing past brambles, cracking branches like
bones, scuffling the leaf litter. My eyes slouched. Four hours of sleep is not
enough…
A feathered
pinwheel erupted from the leaves underfoot. “Oh shit!” I hissed,
flinching backwards. The olive pinwheel flopped away with exaggerated wing
beats, chipping angrily.
“Wait for
it, wait for it,” said Sammy. He walked ahead and stooped, bending back some seedlings.
“Ah-HA!” he yelled triumphantly. I walked up, bent over, and saw the nest—a
straw-y cereal bowl submerged in leaves, invisible from overhead view. The
three small eggs looked like someone had systematically sneezed fine brown snot all
over them.
I had never
seen an Ovenbird nest before. I squinted at it and realized that it looks nothing
like a Dutch oven. For over fifteen years I had blithely believed it looks like
one. The reality of the nest at my feet confronted years of blind faith in the
books. My heart sank. What other false facts are lurking in the literature? What
other misguided analogies masquerade as truth?
When
I returned to my room, I gathered my collection of field guides and scientific
journals and carried them to the fire pit. As the lying pages curled and
blackened, I chuckled with glee at the incineration of falsehood. Take that,
charlatans!
