WILD THINGS: THE STRUGGLE OF MEMORY AGAINST FORGETTING

A dickcissel, a migrating songbird seen recently in Key West. MARK HEDDEN/Keys Weekly

Milan Kundera once wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” That line has long stuck with me. Possibly because I wrote a paper in college about the novel it came from – “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” – and possibly because it’s the first line of said novel.

I’m struggling to remember specifics of characters or plot points from the book, and all I can come up with is the image of a Czechoslovakian Communist leader being airbrushed out of a historic photo after he had fallen from political favor. Also, looking it up, the line I quoted is not the first line of the novel, but the second line of the second chapter. Still, it stuck.

It floated up again the other morning at Fort Zachary Taylor. Not so much the struggle-of-man-against-power part. It was the struggle-of-memory-against-forgetting part. Sometimes I think about how much math I knew as a kid, how many arithmetic hoops I could jump through, and how little of that I have retained.

Sometimes I think about all the birds that migrated north in the spring, and are now migrating south, and I have this overwhelming fear that I’m going to blank out on their IDs, that memory will lose the upper hand to forgetting.

It had been a long, pretty stressful summer, and I hadn’t found time to do much birding, at least not the walk-around-and-see-what-you-can-find type. Mostly it had been mission oriented – going out to track down something specific – or random – seeing something on the way to the grocery store.

 And I’d spent most of the previous week driving to Alabama to pick up a dog. I felt out of touch with one of the things that most reliably brings me joy in life. Especially since it was migration season in one of the best places in the country to see migration in action.

Honestly, I was worried about leaving the new dog alone in the house. But it had to happen some time, so I figured I’d bird for an hour, and see if the dog got into any trouble.

Walking into the hammock, my fears of having gone bird stupid were allayed a bit when the bird world threw me a softball – an American redstart, the small, impossible to misidentify warbler spinning its way up a branch with its tail spread like a cancan dancer. Next there was an overbird, another small warbler, doing a Mick Jagger strut.

Up on the berm the world scaled up when I flushed a chuck-will’s-widow, a brown bird, the size of my wife’s shoe, that zig-zagged away through the trees. A blue-gray gnatcatcher, a diminutive Old World warbler, threw me by the way that it didn’t spin as it disappeared and reappeared behind a cluster of leaves. I looked up to see a flock of snowy egrets in formation. A common-yellowthroat, another newly arrived warbler, was working low in a bush.

At the edge of the moat a magnificent frigatebird circled overhead. Then, a hundred yards away, a large black mass dropped at an attack angle toward the far edge of the moat. It disappeared into a low copse of trees with a slapping sound and I worried.

Nothing happened for a solid minute, but then a dark-phase short-tailed hawk popped up, having missed its target, and drifted off.

It’s always a debate whether it’s worth the long walk across the field at Fort Zach to the cluster of trees known informally as the Back 40, especially when it’s hot as Hades, but I started toward it. Halfway there I spotted a pile of feathers and bones. The skull was missing, but the long legs made me think wading bird, and when I flipped one of the wings over, there was a lot of rufous in the feathers, which made me think green heron.

While being all “CSI: Bird Crimes” I heard a splash behind me and turned to see a belted kingfisher rise out of the water. Then I heard what my notes describe as a “low recipe grunt” – it was voice to text, so no doubt I didn’t say recipe – and I turned to see a white ibis in a descending glide over the water.

As I worked toward the Back 40 I caught sight of the white S-shape of a great white heron in the shadow of a buttonwood, then the smiley-face yellow of a prairie warbler in a mangrove, then, a hundred feet above the fort, the frenetic flapping of a merlin, the most psycho of the American falcons, on an urgent mission to cause some mischief somewhere.

In the blessed shade of the hammock I heard the yip of a barn swallow, but didn’t bother to look for it, as I’d seen a few thousand on the drive from Alabama. Then I saw a black-and-white warbler spiraling up a branch, as if trying to trace the erratic stripe of a poorly painted barber pole. 

There was a quintet of basic Florida Keys bird species – a pair of northern mockingbirds, a royal tern, a laughing gull and a mourning dove.

The first bird that made me doubt myself was in a patch of ragweed on the way back across the field. It was a mid-sized songbird, brown and streaky, with a big honking bill, clinging to one of the stalks. I waved a butterfly net around my skull for a while, came up with nothing, felt defeated briefly, and then saw it clearly: a dickcissel, which is not some fourth-grade version of profanity, but instead the name of a small, seed-eating bird that breeds in the Midwest and that you get to see here once or twice a year if you’re lucky.

The alarm went off on my phone, telling me it had been an hour. I hadn’t even gotten to all the good spots in the park, so I hit repeat and headed back toward the hammock for another hour.

When I got home, the new dog had only eaten a single pair of my flip flops.

Mark Hedden is a photographer, writer, and semi-professional birdwatcher. He has lived in Key West for more than 25 years and may no longer be employable in the real world. He is also executive director of the Florida Keys Audubon Society.