Alarm Cry

~~ PROLOGUE ~~

With no obtruding hills or towns, with no more than 15 feet variation in elevation for 100 miles, the sun shoots up quickly over the saw grass prairies and tropical forests of interior south Florida. Even where cypress trees tower 120 feet or more, full light soon makes its way through their feathery branches.

            A man rejoices at this quick transformation from dove-colored predawn light to full sun. He sets up a tripod and trains a spotting telescope westward on an enormous nest near the top of a lofty cypress in a dome-shaped hammock 40 yards away. The trees, which rise abruptly from a wet prairie of pinkish, spiky grass and black marsh, increase in size toward the tallest at the center. The nest is near the top of one of the trees that flank the tallest, perhaps 80 feet up.

            As he swings his scope upward, the man is temporarily distracted by the petulant whistles of an osprey in rapid, low flight. “Hmmm. A competitor for fish.” He is thinking how the raptors might vie for catches in a wild unnamed pond that lies on the other side of the hammock. He makes a mental note to look for the osprey’s nest later.

            But now that mammoth eagle nest, four or five feet across, consumes his interest. Some of its boughs appear an inch or more thick and splay out at bizarre angles. He adjusts his focus on its owners, two adult bald eagles perched on a branch above their home.

            He has recently heard about this nest in a hard-to-reach area, and has wanted to view it even though eagles themselves are no longer rare in south Florida. The bad old days of DDT damage are thankfully history now in 1991, and he can’t suppress a moment of pride in remembering how he had lobbied against use of the deforming pesticide back in the 1960s.

            Although the man is a well-known birder with upwards of 500 species on his American life list, this isn’t part of a listing effort. This is simply the joy of a bird-watcher watching birds. Amidst the orchestra of a dozen songbirds and marsh birds tuning up with an alligator’s bellow serving as percussion, he is aware of a human footfall approaching. This doesn’t surprise him; he had breakfast a half hour earlier with several other birders, as he regularly did. Their custom is to eat an early breakfast at a remote café, then go off singly or in pairs to pursue their separate ornithologic interests. Often they encounter one another in the field before returning to the café to talk about the morning’s sightings over coffee.

            The increasing sunlight is intensifying the brightness of the eagles’ white hoods and yellow beaks, so he continues to study the birds, thinking the footsteps probably belong to one of his friends. Or maybe they belong to a couple of somewhat bedraggled but friendly Indian youngsters he had greeted earlier. “Looks like they’ve been out all night,” he had thought.

            Finally, the man turned around to acknowledge whoever it was. “Oh, hello...” He recognized the other person.

Hello. That universal greeting may also have been his farewell.