The Red Circle
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The Red Circle
In a donation pile at a church rummage sale in rural Ohio, a 58-year field notebook turned up — the lifetime bird checklist of a man who spent every free hour of his adult life cataloging what flew overhead. Every species is marked with a neat penciled check. One isn't. One is circled, in red ink, with nothing written beside it.
A composition book turned up at a church rummage sale in Castalia, Ohio — soft marbled cover, spine mended with packing tape two or three times over, coffee ring on the back. Inside: a lifetime of birds. Every weekend, every free Saturday. Fifty-eight years of driving out before dawn to marshes and wildlife refuges and farm fields along Lake Erie. Four hundred and twelve species, each with a date, a location, sometimes a weather note, and a small pencil check.
This episode opens that notebook and reads five entries in order — from the very first robin in April 1964 to a Prothonotary Warbler watched for six exact minutes in the August heat at Magee Marsh, to a Snowy Owl on a fence post that took three separate trips to finally find, to one quiet sentence buried in a 2007 Palm Warbler entry: D. has been gone three years now. Still come out. Hard to explain why but I do. The final entry has no date. No check. Just a name — Kirtland's Warbler — circled in the only red ink in the entire book.
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