The month is May, the year 2021 — in just a few days, I will be graduating from college. After that, I will go back home to Connecticut, and perhaps eventually someplace else for work, but either way, I probably won’t be returning to northern Maryland or to Soldiers Delight anytime soon. The idea of my relationship with this place ending, of this whole part of my life ending, makes me nervous. I have never been very fond of change and endings in particular are difficult — as natural cutoff points in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, they force reflection on the past, the present, the future, how things could have been, and how they might never be. There is value in this sort of reflection, as many of my teachers have been trying to tell us over the past few weeks, but I have a recent, not-especially-pleasant history of ruminating a little too much on these sorts of things and am still a bit skittish around anything that seems like it could return me to that place. I am here today at Soldiers Delight because I know that I will regret it if I don’t visit one more time, but in doing so, I am breaking a rule that I set for myself several weeks back — namely, not to begin any of my goodbyes until the last possible moment, to live as much as possible in the present.

Of course, the exception is rather easy to make and to justify. In addition to the obvious logistical challenges with waiting for the last minute to say goodbye to a whole ecosystem, my plans for the morning do not involve anything especially different from what I usually do when I come here. Although it is perhaps best known for hosting a number of rare plants endemic to the Mid-Atlantic serpentine barrens, the biological wonders that have most attracted me to Soldiers Delight are its birds. Within its boundaries, the park contains many different habitats, from typical east coast forests of oak and hickory to wide open fields of grass and prairie flowers; from thick oak-juniper scrublands to muddy, creek-side maple forests. The transition zones between these habitats host the rich diversity of birdlife typical of such areas, while the forests and grasslands and creeks themselves are home to sparser communities of more specialized and often rarer species. All I plan to do today is simply walk the Choate Mine trail, which takes one through just about all the habitat types that Soldiers Delight has to offer, watching and listening to the birds and, in checking them off my list, silently saying my goodbyes.

The trail starts in a forest of oak, juniper, and pine where, hidden deep in a thick understory of green briar and the scattered glare of 07:30-sun, a chorus of spring birds lets loose with a program of seasonal hits. A pair of black-and-white warblers, recent arrivals from wintering grounds potentially as far south as Peru, duel for technical superiority at a song which sounds something like the squeak of a wettened finger rubbing against the side of a glass. A red-breasted nuthatch, generally rare in Maryland, has been reporting its wry, nasally yank-yank call from just out of sight in this thicket since late March. Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and northern cardinals, all year-round residents that spent their winters here, take a break from the foraging frenzy required to keep alive in the colder months to sing of territorial dominance, of the desire for a mate, perhaps sometimes of nothing but the warmth of the sun on their backs. Finally, as I approach the middle of the thicket, its host begins to repeat his annual instructions: drink…your…TEA! Standing still for a moment to listen, I mutter my own traditional response back at the towhee — “don’t tell me what to do!”

As I emerge from the forest and onto a scrubby grassland, the chorus of birds fades behind me — of all the habitats at Soldiers Delight, the barrens themselves tend to host the fewest species. Those that do call this part of the park home, however, are also some of the most interesting, since they are usually adapted specifically to nest in scrub habitats and are therefore less likely to be seen in the forests, farms, and human settlements that dominate the rest of the region. Trudging on beneath the rising heat of the midmorning sun, I keep my ears open for one species in particular, a lovely migratory songbird called the prairie warbler, which I have come to associate with this place more than any of the others. With the general decline in scrubby habitats in the eastern United States over the past few decades, these birds, which require them to breed, have become a bit rarer, leaving places like Soldiers Delight as important refugia. In fact, I had never actually seen a prairie warbler before a few months ago, when I followed a rapidly rising, high-pitched and buzzy song to its source and discovered it belonged to a warbler rather than a field sparrow as I had originally thought. I watched through my binoculars as the bird hopped rapidly through the still-bare branches of a stunted oak, likely on the hunt for cold-stretching insects, and tried to wrap my head around the reality of its bright yellow and sharply-black-streaked plumage before it disappeared deeper into the brush.

Walking out onto the barren this morning, it isn’t long before I hear the same insectoid scales emanating from the thickets around me, but when I raise my binoculars to try and actually spot the singer, I find that he is well-hidden among the nearly full-grown late spring leaves. But no matter — this is only the first of several spots along the trail where I regularly see prairie warblers, and the day is still young. In the meantime, in addition to several field sparrows and a few eastern towhees, I manage to spot another obligate scrub dweller — an optically striking white-eyed vireo foraging busily in the undergrowth. Then, arriving at Red Run, I stop for a while to admire the aerial acrobatics of a small group of eastern wood-pewees as they hunt for flying insects from perches on wise old sycamores that lean over the creek. In the oak-hickory forest just uphill, I watch as a large pileated woodpecker bobs off gracefully between the trees and, back on the barrens below, a male blue-grey gnatcatcher glares down at me from beneath his characteristic angry unibrow.

The prairie warblers, however, remain cryptic, singing from deep in the thickets and high in the trees, but never allowing me to get a glimpse of them until I am nearly at the end of the loop. Then, just past the abandoned entrances to a few old chromium mines that lend the trail its name, I spot a small flash of yellow among the branches of a nearby Virginia pine, identified a second later in the delayed illumination of a warbler’s song. Raising my binoculars, I train them on a few different gaps in the maze of branches and needles near the one where the bird first appeared. There is more shadowy movement and momentary flashes of color, along with regular repetitions of the song, but still no glimpse of the full bird. Sensing that this may be my last chance of the day to see this particular sight, I decide to keep looking, craning my neck until it begins to ache with a slight sort of pain familiar enough to birders that it has been given the name “warbler neck,” due to the penchant that these tiny, high-canopy-loving birds have for inducing it. Resisting the urge to stop and stretch, I scour the bundles and spaces and shadows that make up the interior of the tree until, like a word repeated too many times, it loses the focus of reality and I begin to feel a familiar combination of annoyance and disappointment, one which I have often felt before when a carefully-planned goodbye runs into an inconvenient obstacle. Both grow in intensity as the minutes pass, until they approach the space of bitterness.

I am surprised by the intensity of my reaction to this seemingly minor turn of events. Why is it, I suddenly begin to wonder, that seeing this bird directly is so important to me? After all, it’s not like I have absolutely nothing to show for my efforts to find one today — even the small flashes of color that have made up my only sightings so far are better than one often gets when bird watching and the bird’s song, which I think of as just as much a symbol of Soldiers Delight as seeing the warbler itself, has been woven throughout the whole day. In fact, I’ve seen and heard a lot of birds today that I would consider important parts of my understanding of this place and its wildlife, from the towhee to the field sparrow. Now, it’s getting late, and I have other commitments to attend to this afternoon — so why have I spent the last fifteen minutes trying to get the perfect look at this one species?

Perhaps as a result of spending the last week studying for biology finals, the explanation I come up with first is an evolutionary one. Humans are, for the most part, highly visual creatures, a characteristic which, at least among mammals, makes us rather unique. Humans, as well as most other derived primates, have forward-facing, closely-spaced eyes that give us excellent depth perception, and brains with comparatively large regions devoted to processing visual information. While most mammals have only two kinds of color receptors (or cones), we have three, which may have given our distant, tailed and tree-dwelling ancestors an important advantage in locating fruit and determining its ripeness. These features of our biology, along with our comparative lack of ability with respect to our other senses, have led humans and other primates to develop a way of experiencing and coming to understand the world around us that necessarily emphasizes the visual, an emphasis which is reflected in common phrases like “a picture is worth a thousand words” or in its practical realization via books, reports, and manuals complemented by helpful graphs and diagrams. Insofar as the prairie warbler has become a symbol of my relationship with Soldiers Delight, perhaps this is the reason why I don’t feel like I can end that relationship without getting one last good look at one — to do so would be to ignore a major part of how I have constructed this place and its significance in my head.

This theory has the same advantage that any armchair evolutionary explanation for a specific human behavior has, that being a connection to, if not the direct experimental backing of, a well-supported branch of empirical science. At the same time, it also retains a common problem with these sorts of explanations in that it explains a substantial, but nonetheless singular, trend in what turns out to be a complex web of everyday human experiences. There are a number of people, for one, who have trouble seeing or simply cannot see at all, and who therefore do not construct their understanding of the world primarily through sight. What’s more, even though humans who can see do generally rely pretty heavily on sight, this is not so much to the detriment of our other senses that perceptions of the world mediated by hearing, touch, or smell cannot also produce intense and valued meaning. Imagine, for example, if the sensational landscape of my search for a prairie warbler was reversed — if I were getting clear glimpses of warblers left and right throughout my whole walk, but never heard one. Would I not still be standing here, waiting a quarter of an hour in breathless anticipation for this particular bird to sing?

I am reminded of my Papa and the last time I visited him at the hospice where he lived for the last few months of his life. Shortly before he died of lung cancer in the fall of 2018, I was lucky enough to be able to take the train up to Boston and say goodbye. One of the things I remember most vividly about that day was how difficult it seemed to be for my Papa to speak and how little of the talking he did as a result. For context, my Papa was a soft-spoken but extremely talkative man. He was known for telling long, gently arching stories, with inciting incidents and rising actions that gave no clue whatsoever as to where the story was going, only to tie it all together into an always surprising, amusing, or at least somewhat interesting resolution. Most of the times that I have approached and struck up a conversation with a stranger have been after spending a week with my Papa and seeing him do it so often that it no longer felt like a big deal. I loved my Papa a lot and I don’t think that there is anything in the world that I would have traded for the opportunity to see him that last time — except, perhaps, for a goodbye in which I could also hear the comforting cadence of his voice telling one more long-winded, strangely satisfying story.

But why stop there? My relationship with my Papa was about much more than just listening to his stories. If I were to design a truly perfect goodbye, it would involve so much more, from the feeling of one more smoocha (a family “Italian” word referring to a combination raspberry-kiss performed by a man with a mustache) to the smells of cooking one more meal of pasta and sausage and meatballs with him and my Noni.

And what about my friends at school? A perfect goodbye in their case would surely involve more than a face-to-face meeting and a hug (simple conditions which COVID may still render impossible) — it would involve one more night of playing cards, one more long after-meal conversation, one more lab period of stupid banter over a half-dissected lamprey. I would be able to let them know how much their friendship means to me and how sorry I am for that one stupid thing I said a few years back that they probably don’t even remember. All in all, the perfect end to these sorts of intricately woven relationships would require carefully tying each and every loose end and cutting so that nothing hangs over unresolved — a feat which, I think, is almost certainly not possible. What we are saying goodbye to is just too big for any embrace to reach fully and satisfactorily around it.

My relationship with the warblers of Soldiers Delight, of course, is nowhere near as complex as those I have with my Papa or my college friends. Altogether, it seems to contain only two crucial elements — the expansive song of the prairie warbler and a clear glimpse of the bird itself, shining in the mid-morning sun. The relationship is simple, and yet I still find myself unable to say what I believe to be a proper farewell, as I crane my neck, trying to shove the realities of another independent mind into the neat, narrow structure of a satisfying story.

So, after a while, I give up and stop trying — the warbler has flown deeper into the undergrowth and it seems unlikely that I will be able to spot it again. I turn around, still a little disappointed, and walk out towards the parking lot, letting its song slowly fade behind me. Arriving at my car, I pause for a moment. I really do have to leave soon, but figuring that I have already infused more attempts at ceremony into the day than originally intended, I decide to close my eyes and listen, trying for one last impression of this place to hold onto as I leave it behind.

It is almost noon, and even now, at the height of breeding season, most of the birds have called it quits on their daily performance to rest or forage for food. Still, a few take occasional breaks from their daily chores to send a few bars out through the midday stillness. The grasshopper trill of a field sparrow rises with the roadtop heat back up towards their shared source in the sun. A northern mockingbird, sitting up on top of a power line, bounces through an organized series of discrete meters, tempos, and keys that resembles a Sondheim breakdown song. From the direction of the thicket, a pair of cardinals check in on each other with a constant string of concerned chips! A gentle wind huffs and the grass rattles and the leaves whisper slight runs over vamping chords of hidden cicadas. From somewhere high above comes the show-biz cry of a red-tailed hawk.

It’s beautiful. And it’s very mundane. The songs are many — but not all of them. For just a moment, they fill my senses and then they are quickly diluted, splashed thoroughly by present after present. I regain my focus a few times, manage to gather it all back together, and take a few more closed-eye pictures before letting my mind wander again.

The chorus is sliced through by the slam of the car door, and from the connection between bluetooth and phone there rises the tin whistle-topped opening chord of a Dropkick Murphys song. Turning out of the parking lot in the direction of campus, I drive off down the road, out beneath a big, open sky.