Native Range

Dale slammed the truck door, walked inside the agency office, and threw down the net gun. Ever since he was a little boy, he had only ever wanted to be a wildlife biologist. But now that he was one, he was not so sure. These were not the animals he wanted to work with. And Florida? Good God, he hated it here.

As a kid, he had watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and

read every book in the school library about animals. His parents humored him at first but made clear their disapproval when he started applying to college. This was not a profession that people like them had, they told him. They told him to work a normal job in town and start a family. Dale ignored their comments as he commuted to the local college and again as he later searched for a job in his field.

During the interview, the men from the state agency had explained the situation. Trumpeter swans were on the verge of extinction up north. To be sure a random weather event never wiped their small population off the face of the earth, scientists had decided to create a special flock that didn’t know how to migrate. These birds would instead live in Florida full time. It was far outside of their native range, but preliminary studies suggested they could survive here.

The position sounded exciting. He was to catch the 30-pound white birds, put transmitters on them, and then follow them around to see where they went. He could hardly believe that if he got the position, then he finally would be a real wildlife biologist.

They offered him the job. The day after he got the call, he packed his pickup truck full of cardboard boxes containing tools, dirty laundry, half-eaten boxes of Little Debbie’s, and unread books. He took a last walk behind the house where he grew up and admired the rhododendron beginning to bloom. He ate a home-cooked breakfast of biscuits and gravy. He said goodbye to his grandmother. He double-checked that his Leatherman was in his pocket. Then he drove down the mountain and joined the throng of retirees, northerners, and vacationers heading south on I-95. He made his way to the state of relentless sunshine to start his dream job.

Now, after two years with the agency, he saw that the

situation was hopeless. The birds, as majestic as they looked, were completely stupid. They walked into traffic, flew into power lines, and left their helpless babies on the other side of chain-link fences. They attacked their reflections in shiny new cars and destroyed golf course greens. They were defenseless against predators such as bobcats, alligators, and bald eagles.

The experimental population had dwindled and the state was

pulling the plug on the project. All there was left for him to do was document the behavior of the remaining 12 birds as they gradually succumbed to the subtropical conditions they were never intended for.

Then there were the Floridians. Two types of people liked

swans: crazies and idiots. The crazies worshipped the swans like magical beings that had chosen their yards to mate in like some kind of sign from God. The idiots fed them hotdogs and tried to run them over with golf carts. Both types called Dale day and night, always angry about something either the birds or the

agency had done. One caller would demand that he leave the birds alone and the next would ask permission to shoot them because they tore up the front lawn.

Just last week, a marauding swan trapped an old woman in her home, attacking her every time she went out to get the mail. College had not prepared him for this.

He booted up his computer and sat down to see where the trumpeter swans had wandered off to today. Despite his frustrations with his job, the technology he used still impressed him. He had equipped each bird with a tiny transmitter that essentially called home every time it flew past a cell phone tower. Whenever this happened, he received GPS coordinates that showed up as a small red dot on a map, allowing him to visualize where the birds had been during the day.

He kicked off his boots, went to the office kitchen, and microwaved a cup of yesterday’s coffee while he waited for the map to load. Back at his computer, the map seemed abnormally zoomed out. He zoomed in and could see the cluster of 12 birds together, in the same general area he had left them yesterday.

He knew each bird by the name of its 3-digit radiofrequency. He could see number 507 at the Swan Worshiper’s house. She liked to feed the swans white bread, even though he had told her repeatedly that doing so was against the law. Numbers 676 and 893 were hanging around the golf course, much to the displeasure of the property manager. And there was 383, out in a pasture with a herd of cows. All of them were just walking around, being stupid and conspicuous like usual.

He hit refresh and again the map zoomed out. He looked closer, trying to figure out why the program was glitching. He noticed a tiny red dot in another state. Was that Ontario? Zooming in on the outlier, he read its number: 383. He twisted his cheek around until a tuft of goatee hairs was in his mouth where he could chew on it. He zoomed back to Florida to see bird 383 in the same location as usual. He zoomed back to Ontario, and there was 383. Not trusting his eyes, he went back and forth between the two points repeatedly until he assured himself that indeed the computer program was showing bird 383 to be in two locations simultaneously, across the country from each other.

“Son of a gun,” he said, pushing his chair back. Here was another problem with these stupid transmitters. What was the point of spending $12,000 on a satellite tracker if he was just going to have to find the birds on foot anyway?

Muttering, he put his boots back on and got into his Ford-150 truck with the agency symbol on the side. He headed south on the turnpike, then took an exit that led him down backroads to a gated pasture. He drove across the grass and over small prickly pears. He swerved to miss patches of palmettos, avoided gopher tortoise holes, and skirted the edge of a big pond.

He noticed a herd of cows to his left and then saw 383 standing among them like a big white flag. He sighed and spit out a sunflower seed shell. “What an idyllic habitat for these magnificent birds”, he thought to himself sarcastically, “right in a pile of cow shit.” He took a picture of the bird to document its location and turned the truck around.

***

When he returned to his office the next morning, the phone was ringing. “This is Dale,” he said, turning on the friendly voice that he used with strangers. Like most of the Southern Appalachian diaspora, he was an expert in code-switching.

“Hi Dale, this is Bev from the Canadian Swan Foundation,” said the voice, with a strong Canadian accent.

He squinted his eyes shut as he listened, his facial expression conveying pain. He did not do well with accents. They mostly all just sounded like some kind of speech impediment to his Appalachian ears. He had not met this woman, but he had dealt

with other employees of the CSF and they were all egomaniacs. An elite few were famous for teaching captive-raised birds to migrate by leading them in ultralight aircraft. They all seemed to look down on any other agency that worked with swans.

“We have one of your birds,” she said, and Dale thought he detected a patronizing tone in her nasal words. “It showed up here yesterday and is hanging out with our breeding flock.”

Bev went on to explain that the Ontario flock was gathering for their spring migration. “Unlike your little experimental flock down there in Florida, our birds migrate,” she explained as if Dale did not know this fact. “Your bird must have gotten lost and then been attracted by all the commotion on the ground here.”

Dale needed time to process this information. Could the red dot in Ontario he saw on hiscomputer screen yesterday have represented a real bird? “Do you have a picture of it?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “I took some through a spotting scope. I’ll send one as soon as I get back to my desk.”

Dale hung up the phone and waited. The email came through after 30 minutes but he did not open it. He was curious, but hesitating felt like making her wait and he liked the power shift he imagined it caused. He did not like other people telling him what to do, especially uppity ones like her.

He finally could stand the anticipation no longer, so he clicked on Bev’s message and opened the picture. He saw a grainy circle of green bordered by black and a bird-shaped white object in the center. He zoomed in to see a square, dark transmitter around the neck and a pattern of colored plastic bands on the bird’s right leg: orange on top of two yellows.

He knew the pattern by heart, but he pulled up his spreadsheet of the birds and their band patterns just to be sure. Had he accidentally color-banded a second swan with the same pattern? His head swam, overwhelmed with sudden feelings of

incompetency. But that would mean he had also fitted it with a defective satellite transmitter that just happened to broadcast at a duplicate frequency. What were the odds of that happening?

He brooded on the possibilities until the smells of other people’s lunches coming from the kitchen brought him back to awareness of time passing. He pulled up the picture he had taken yesterday. Comparing it to the photo from Ontario, he could see the similarities. Right leg, orange band over two yellows. The transmitter in place. Dale spit into the trash can. “Well, shit,” he said.

***

That night, Dale dreamed he was walking through a marsh where tiny creatures floated around him like caddisflies rising off the water. When he looked closer, he saw that they were not insects but rather pinpricks of light that spun in all directions. He looked up to see a trumpeter swan perched on the branch of an overhanging cypress tree.

It fluttered down and alighted on a floating burdock root directly in front of him. It looked at him thoughtfully and then extended its neck. Dale drew back, fearing a strike to the face; but instead, it opened its beak and sang like a wood thrush. Then, the bird split and became two birds. In unison, the two swanslifted to the air, the shining particles bouncing in their wake. The pair disappeared through the pines and cypress, singing the song of the thrush as

they flew.

The memory of the dream did not come to him until after his second cup of coffee the next morning. As a kid, he had once had a nightmare about a neighbor’s dog chasing him that made him afraid to play in the yard the next day. Aside from that, he never remembered his dreams and thought people who claimed they did were just inventing wild tales to get attention. But the vividness of this dream’s memory was like the recollection of a real event. It flashed in his mind throughout the day and made it difficult to concentrate.

***

“Your bird is not looking good,” Bev said on a crackling landline connection, the sound quality making it even more difficult for Dale to decipher her words.

“How so?” he asked loudly into the phone.

“It’s sitting down and its head is drooping. We are thinking of trying to capture it, but we are a bit short-staffed right now.  We have a film crew here making a documentary about one of the ultralight pilots.”

Dale rolled his eyes. The CSF did a lot of publicity stunts. Marlin Perkins had more self-respect than that. He would have dropped everything to come to the aid of an injured animal, cameras or no cameras.

Bev paused, mistaking  Dale’s silent condemnation on the other end of the phone line for envy. She continued, “It’s really weird, too…it’s like the other swans feel sorry for it and are trying to help.”

“What do you mean?” Dale asked, keeping skepticism from his voice. He half expected her to tell him she could communicate with the swans telepathically, just like crazy Floridians did.

“Well, a dozen or so are gathered around it,” she explained. “And one keeps preening its feathers for it. I thought it was going to pull the transmitter off its neck at one point. Even I have never seen them act this way.”

***

Over the next two days, both 383s were abnormally sedentary. Ontario 383 remained in the flock, listless, attended to by the other swans who were otherwise antsy for spring migration to begin. They flapped and honked and had short-lived altercations. But they never moved away from 383. Likewise, Florida 383 remained in its pasture, alone amongst the cows who ignored it.

It was early evening on the third day when Dale got into his truck and headed toward the pasture with his trapping equipment. Capturing the bird would be difficult without a second biologist, but he did not want to ask anyone at the agency for help. He felt like the birds were sick or maybe even dying, even though he did not have a scientific reason to believe so. There should not be two of them, Dale thought, chewing his beard more than usual as he drove. Something was just plain wrong with this situation.

Bats were beginning their nighttime sorties just over his head as he walked across the muddy pasture. As the moon rose above the distant pines, he again remembered his dream. He saw the bird at a distance, sitting at the edge of the pond, head tucked under its feathers.

“This part should be easy”, he thought. “I can hide behind those palmettos and get a clear shot with the net gun. I can cover the

distance before the bird goes in the water, examine it, and switch the transmitter. Tomorrow, everything will make sense again.”

The bird stayed asleep as Dale positioned himself, swatting mosquitoes with as little commotion as possible. He double-checked the CO₂ cartridge and raised the net gun. He aimed. Just as he was about to pull the trigger, the pond erupted in a loud shower of water and white feathers as a large dark object erupted out of the glassy surface and the bird lurched first upward then

down.

The swan never had a chance. The alligator grabbed it by one leg and immediately drug it to the deep center of the pond where it began rolling over and again with its prey.

Dale was stunned. He had seen things like this happen on blurry trail camera footage before, but never in person. He continued to stare wide-eyed, mosquitoes dotting his forehead. Eventually, the thrashing stopped and the animals disappeared downward, leaving nothing but bubbles and some white feathers floating peacefully on the surface of the dark water.

The pasture was quiet. He suddenly felt afraid but brushed the feeling aside. A real wildlife biologist would not feel fear in a cow pasture. He walked back to his truck and drove home.

He slept little and arrived at the office before anyone else. He opened the map of transmitter locations. There was Florida 383, right in the middle of the pond, no doubt in the belly of an alligator. He did not see a dot in Ontario, so he zoomed in and panned around. After searching unsuccessfully for several minutes, he checked his email. There was a message from Bev with the subject “Bird is gone.”

His heart sped up and for a moment, he wondered how she knew about the alligator. He felt as if she had caught him doing something wrong. However, after reading the message twice, he realized that Ontario 383 had simply taken flight with the rest of the flock. It was following them to their breeding ground in the tundra.

***

Dale recovered Florida 383’s transmitter, although it took a full week longer for the alligator to excrete it than he had anticipated. Because there were so few cell phone towers at the latitude where the migratory swans went, he knew it was unlikely that Ontario 383 would check in any time soon. So he resumed his duties of monitoring the 11 remaining swans and calming angry stakeholders. He waited for it to come back.

In the fall, when the migratory birds and their fledglings returned to Ontario in a great undulating wave, Ontario 383 did not appear to be with them. This fact was difficult to verify, however, since all the birds looked alike and none of them wore color bands. Dale was disappointed not to be able to monitor 383 anymore, but somehow he knew it was there in the flock with its own kind. He could not

figure out how it removed the transmitter and color bands, but in his mind, he congratulated it.

Dale was thinking about 383 when he again packed his truck full of cardboard boxes and got on I-95. This time he drove north and

did not stop driving until he reached the Tennessee state line. When he, at last, stepped out of the truck in his parent’s driveway, he heard a wood thrush singing. He knew he was back where he belonged.