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That just strikes me as very human.”

The summer I visited, it was sophomore Brielle Michener’s job to provoke great black-backed parents. Continuing a gull-triggering experiment that had started the previous year, Michener, a farm girl from Massachusetts, would put on a bright blue poncho to become the same generic blob of color as last summer’s intern, squish a round black bike helmet over her blonde curls, and stand very close to a nest with eggs or hatched chicks to see how the parent reacts. Short answer: They didn’t like it. In fact, the birds got so angry Michener had to modify the way she logged their response. At the bottom of the typed scale she had tucked into her notebook that day, with “0” being no reaction at all and “7” being charging at her, she showed me where she’d scrawled an “8” in black pen, for times when the gulls flew at her head or bit her ankles.

Thankfully, contact like that was rare. More often, when Michener approached a nest in the brush, the bobbing head of a black-backed parent would lift up sharply, and the bird would let out a repetitive, guttural ah-ah or ow-ow that continued loudly until she backed away. Though it was probably meant to sound scary, it sounded scared, Michener thought, and she once asked Courchesne what to make of it. Courchesne had told her that over the years, she’d seen these big, intimidating gulls get as panicked by approaching humans as they did flyovers from predators like bald eagles. “People might think they’re being a nuisance acting like this,” Michener explained to me, “but they’re really terrified.”

Michener’s research was directed by Kristen Covino, an assistant professor of biology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, as part of a broad study of hormones in great black-backeds. Michener had discovered that many of the island’s most aggressive gulls had paired up with other highly aggressive gulls rather

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Call Adam today at (561) 800-0041 www.princetonam.com than choosing a mellower partner who might blunt their sharp edges. The result, Courchesne says, will likely be extra-aggressive offspring.

“Is there a benefit to pairing off with another aggressive bird and making offspring that tend to be more aggressive?” she says. “It might actually be maladaptive to be too reactive to humans. We just don’t know.” Courchesne says so little is known about these birds, she’s not even sure aggressive pairings are unusual. “But my hope for them,” she says, “if I’m trying to find an angle where I don’t get completely pessimistic about their prospects for continuing to exist, is that they are individually, behaviorally plastic enough that a specific bird could deal with these challenges and change its behavior and find a way to make its way through the world. That’s my hope with these gulls.”

Afew days before joining Noah Perlut on the roof of the Portland Museum of Art, I met him next door at the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine. The museum had contacted him about a herring gull nesting behind the wooden-pirate-ship play area. Unlike the PMA, the children’s museum had only this one nest, and that was a fluke. “Occasionally the babies will fall down [from the PMA] once they’re learning to fly and they’ll end up in the backyard,” says Tara Fletcher, the museum’s exhibits and visitor services assistant. “And we’ll just kind of shoo them out and they meet up with their parents in the parking lot.” The children’s museum had asked the PMA for the name of its bird guy, and one morning before the museum opened, Perlut showed up to band the gull.

It had rained the night before, and the only sound was the shoosh of traffic on Free Street, on the other side of the building. “I’m going to try and catch this bird by hand,” Perlut said, eyeing the gull, which sat in blissful ignorance in its nest, flanked by trash bins. “And then I’ll take this pant leg”—he waved a worn piece of khaki—“and stick it over its head to cover its eyes. That calms it down.”

Perlut clucked gently at the bird, which squirmed and began to squawk the closer he got. When the bird stood up he rushed at it, pinning its wings, and his assistant put the pant leg over the bird’s head, which calmed it enough to allow Perlut to strap a lightweight satellite tracking device to its back. Perlut has only a handful of the devices, which are about the size of a flip phone, and they fall off in a year, he said, but in the meantime this tracker will provide him with the bird’s location every four hours. From this one gull, Perlut can learn a lot: where it goes to forage, where it migrates during the winter, whether it returns to the city next summer.

A couple of months later, as summer began to fade, I got an email from Perlut titled “Children’s Museum gull.”

“Just a quick update,” Perlut wrote. “Looks like she is still hanging out in the Greater Portland area.” The attached map showed the gull’s summer travel in red lines that splayed out from the museum in a star shape, each line representing one flight. The star looked as if it had been drawn with an extra-thick marker because the movements were so repetitive—layers upon layers of red lines. The gull had traveled to Long Island in Casco Bay, Westbrook, and Scarborough, but stayed mostly on the Portland peninsula. These were the wanderings of a city mother, foraging for her children from her downtown home.

Staring at the star, I was drawn to a point stretching south, darker and longer than all of the others. A favorite track, it extended straight down off the map over the swath of blue that represented the Atlantic Ocean. I imagined the gull flying over an expanse of glistening ocean, an ocean that seemed to go on forever, flying far and fast and strong. I hoped some of that flight was for the sheer exuberance of defying gravity. I hoped, as John Anderson had told me, it was for the joy of it.

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Life in the Kingdom

(Continued from p. 120)

The reason, of course, is that March 24 is when everything changed. Or rather, March 24 is the day when I fully grasped that everything had changed. Maybe this is because it was the day that I used the last of the cream in my morning coffee and knew I wouldn’t be going to Willey’s store for more (though I was sorely tempted), or because it was the day that our governor issued a “stay home” order for all but essential workers. Most likely, it was simply because the constant drumbeat of news relating to the coronavirus—the overwhelmed hospitals and healthcare workers, the swift and merciless economic fallout— had finally burst through the bubble of our quiet rural life, which until this point had seemed far removed from the chaos unfolding out there.

To be sure, we hadn’t been entirely unaffected by the pandemic. We’d stocked up on essentials (ice cream, check … coffee, check … cat food, check … and yes, toilet paper, check) and as many fresh vegetables as we figured we could eat before they rotted. We’d already taken advantage of our local library’s “call in” service; after requesting our chosen titles, my wife, Penny, went to retrieve the books, which had been left in a paper bag outside the front door. Figuring there was no better place to practice social distancing than deep in the woods, I picked up some new chains and a few gallons of bar oil for the saw and filled two five-gallon cans with ethanol-free gas. If nothing else, we’d emerge from this pandemic with a heck of a firewood pile.

And yet before March 24, so much seemed exactly the same. I still woke early, still started the fire and sat quietly while waiting for my coffee to perc. I still did the same chores with the same animals, still climbed to the knoll behind the barn to look out over the old church steeple and into Bob’s hayfield. Maybe there was a little less traffic on our road, but honestly, it was hard to tell, since even on a busy day it’s not uncommon for an hour or more to pass without seeing a car. And unlike so many of our friends and neighbors, I still had work—not a lot, but some, and for the time being, enough. So while I knew the world was changing in ways that would surely reverberate through our lives, it was almost as if we existed in a time lapse, buffered by geography and circumstance. I felt grateful for that buffer. And since I knew what a privilege it was to have it, I felt guilty, too.

I water the cows, and fork hay off the big round bale I’d situated just outside the wooden fence of their paddock. For most of the winter, they’d been running a piece of orchard pasture, but the recent spring weather had gotten their dander up: They’d breached the barbwire fence twice in the previous week, and even wandered across the road and into our (very understanding) neighbor’s backyard. Clearly, this would not do, so in the aftermath of the second escape, we chased them into the confines of the paddock and closed the gate. They would roam no more, at least not until the spring grass had sprung in full. I felt a bit sorry for them—surely they preferred the relative expanse of their pasture lot—but then again, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

After chores, I change into my ski boots and bee-line through town to Bob’s hayfield. Yesterday, it’d been nearly clear of snow, and on my evening walk I’d counted nine deer, heads bent to the ground, so intent on filling their bellies they didn’t even notice me. Today, it is once again an unbroken sheet of white, and I ski straight to the height of the field, where, if I turn around, I can see back across the mountain road and past the church steeple, to the barn and paddock where the cows are still nosing through their morning ration.

But I don’t turn. Instead, I keep climbing the steep pitch beyond the hayfield’s boundary, right up into the sugar woods, where the sun is just high enough that the trees cast narrow shadows in my path. Where I know that if I just put my head down and keep on moving, everything else in the world will fall away.