I travel to visit a friend who several years ago visited me abroad. We’d gone together in a low-riding motorboat up the Nile to see, among other much larger things, a cliffside colony of bee eating birds, who dig with their partners into soft, vertical soil to make stacked homes of the ancient desert sort. These ones now in the Pittsburgh aviary are white-throated, huddled beneath a clouded skylight, ignoring a desiccated mealworm that balances on the rim of a plaque bearing their name.
One hundred and fifty years after bee eater first appeared in my own language, a Frenchman named Constantine returned them to the ancient Greeks: merops for one who eats bees. Or a word used by poets for those gifted in speech. Or a king so stricken by his wife’s death that the goddess Artemis took pity, and set him forever in the heavens as an eagle; it is hard to know where words are born. Latin for white neck is clear enough, but how much lovelier albicollis. Of all the many merops, the albicollis perches closest on Darwin’s branching tree to the carmine, who sings a deep throaty tunk and who, though a native of twenty-six countries, nevertheless occurs as a vagrant in Burundi. Furthest from the albi is a merops flaunting cinnamon underparts, belly awash in flavor.
The women of ancient Egypt breathed their charred legs as medicine, and in India, malicious gossips returned after death as bee eaters, rumors being poison in the mouth. For two million years, just recently unearthed, the bee eaters’ miniature ancestors lay fossilized beneath Austria. Then two thousand years ago, in impassioned defense of honey, both Aristotle and Virgil advocated for their slaughter. Their closest relatives now have names like groundroller, toddie, and motmot, and they are described as having both feathered nostrils and a sluggish lifestyle, though this last is hard to reconcile with something that hunts wasps in midair. Sources say they spend about ten percent of their sunlit hours on comfort activities, which sounds pretty slim to me but maybe a lot for a bird. If they must cross the sea, they do so only at night, an undulating tide of soft bodies above the water’s dark heave.
One merops weighs, say other sources, about the same as forty raisins, which is more than I thought. But maybe raisins weigh less than I thought, since I’ve never thought at all about lifting raisins, nor tiny birds. If I raise up my hands, and on the left alights a feathered eater of bees, and on the right two score grapes sundried golden, this wild harmony would leave room to think of little else, don’t you think?
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Now a pelican lands just beside me, and grips the rail with knuckles greyblue and webbed. He sighs a lot, shifting his weight as he eats mealworms tossed from a kind of leather holster on the zookeeper’s hip. A holster full of mealworms. It surely wasn’t made for this, it looks like the one I sauntered around with during my stint as a volunteer building houses. I loved the holster, made of stiff leather, and trotted to refill it with nails from the communal bin whenever I ran low. There was also a leather loop to drop my hammer in, its head then harnessed but the wooden shaft slapping pleasantly against my thigh as I did things others than hammering. Once I sat heavily on the floor, not thinking, and the head of the hammer was shoved right up into my diaphragm, and my breath forced out with a barking cough. It was one of those small moments we all collect, when things could have gone much worse but didn’t. Like the time my car left the road entirely during an ice storm, and sailed gently past many trees to come to a muffled stop on a little knoll. Or the two times I tripped and fell all the way down my wooden staircase, when I lived alone.
Things are going okay for this pelican, who will never again soar along miles of coastal waters at daybreak, but neither will he be hungry or cold. He rises in his ancient slow-motion way, air curdling and gathering under his arched bones, to a nest atop a mechanical unit high on the greenhouse wall. The person with the holster wades slowly through the concrete river to collect what I see now are eggs, come to rest underwater at the deepest point. I imagine them, too, in slow-motion, slipping away from their mothers in the slick edgegrass, lurching downhill in the way of things not-round, helpless against gravity manmade. I think of my tireless niece trying to roll down a hill and somehow going sideways also, as I did always too when I was eight, in a long curve that slows itself down, maybe because we are also not round, nor meant for the downhill. I did once though read a book that warned me of the foolishness of trying to outrun a wildfire uphill, that fire will always win. Run downhill and you have a chance, it said. If there is a villain in your house, try to run down as well, not up, where you will always lose, especially in a movie. I am comforted to think there may be options, in moments of villainy or wildfire, and that I may make the right choice.
The pelican’s impulse for up is satisfied here, a little, in that he can be higher than me and the eggs, and his body is made for this while ours are not. But not the infinite up of the sky, without corners or fan blades, or the reverberating chaos of too many of your own kind. And of course he has no choices in the matter, which is the real infinity, and I do, except in the case of gravity.
Sarah has been teaching psychology at Bard College in upstate New York for 15 years, working with undergraduates, preschool-aged children (in her research), and wild chimpanzees (in Kibale, Uganda). Her academic writing has appeared in journals including the Journal of Cognition and Development, Folia Primatologica, and Scientific American; her creative nonfiction writing appears in Plume, Pinyon Review, The Common online, Gone Lawn and Dogwood.