Floods

Puffin Colony, Maine, USA

The wind rushes past, ruffling along the back edges of my feathers and stinging my eyes. My partner flies beside me, her wingstrokes almost in tandem with my own. We dip and glide between the ocean’s updrafts, flying in earnest towards the coastline far ahead, just below the horizon. The breeze shifts into warmer currents as we approach the shore, the one we see every year. Just a slope of green before the larger rocky coastline behind it, this island is where we come to breed; this is the island where I was born. We come back every year on the solstice, nesting before summer starts to come. Other pairs land first and latch their feet onto the land, one in front of the other, as they put their beaks to the ground, wings still outstretched. Some of them bump against one another and they part their beaks in momentary annoyance. Then their wings fold and they duck their heads into their burrows. My partner lands just before me and I follow. As she goes to inspect the outer edges of our burrow, the one we’ve used each year, I dip my head inside it.

The dirt gives way above my head; it dislodges and catches between my feathers. I go inside and start to almost dig with my beak to clear out any remnants of the rabbits who use it before us. The ground is soft and my feet begin to sink the farther into the burrow I go. It’s been too wet a season already. I take a few twigs within my beak, stripes of bright red and yellow and more muted blue beginning to emerge, and back out of the burrow. I drop the twigs a few feet from the burrows near to the cliff’s edge, shake my head to rid myself of the drying mud from my otherwise smooth, black forehead, and return to my partner’s side. I lean in, cooing softly, and knock my beak gently against hers. She pauses in her grass inspection to rub back. Our beaks click against each other like rocks along the shore. Soon, the wind carries our castanet chorus as other pairs gather around us, joining in and thriving off our excitement. Now we nest.

- - -

I tilt my head to shift the glare of mid-afternoon sun against the waves and throw the glinting fish in my beak back into shadow. A moon has passed since we nested, since laying our egg, and the days are getting so much longer. My eyes scan the surface of the ocean as it sweeps beneath my wings. There are seagulls up ahead. I see a flash from beneath the waves. Then another. Finally, I’ve found a school. I dive.

My wings pinned to my sides, I fall into the sea. A circus of bubbles engulfs me as I pull the wind down with me. The water it warmer than it used to be. I use my wings like flippers and steer with my feet, propelling myself towards the schooling bait fish. Tongue pressed to the top of my beak to hold my catch in place, I snatch a herring from within its school, pushing through its brethren with every stroke. I turn, spinning with my feet, adjusting the herring in my beak, and make a second pass. I miss; the school’s descending. I pivot again and fly down towards them, creating eddies behind every wingstroke. My momentum dies as I snatch a second fish from its school and pause my forceful strokes. Looking up to the waves now far above me, I scull my feet, right myself, and make my way back up towards the surface.

My feet glance over the tops of the waves in giant strides as I beat my wings and take off. Finally I’m airborne and I tuck my feet beneath me, almost hiding them among my feathers. A puffin passes me on my left, then a second on my right, just moments later. I look ahead to the horizon, to our nesting site still so far away, and see nothing; I look behind us at the vastness of the ocean and see clouds. Dark and grey, they shroud the sky. A wall of rain approaches from beneath them. I fly faster, with miles still ahead of me.

The rain catches up, beating heavily on the feathers of my wings and snapping against their tips as I fly through the downpour. There wasn’t nearly this much rain last year. With shore only a few feet away now, I land, off-balance, on the sodden ground and shake violently, which only serves to spread the watery mud farther across my belly. Beak half parted, water drips from the fish I hold in broken arcs. I duck into our burrow and move quickly to the back where my partner sits beside our egg. Her feathers too are slick with rain. Water drips through the dirt above us, rhythmically, and stains our white egg mostly brown. I move to place the fish in front of her but stop when I see the pooling mud and water at our feet. It seems that nowhere is dry anymore. I coo softly once, then twice, and pass my partner the fish, one at a time, until she’s eaten the entire beakful. She knocks her beak against mine, the wooden sound swallowed by the echoing rain; I tap back, step towards her and take her place warming our soon-to-be puffling.

Egg settled beneath my wing, my partner and I try to sleep. The rain drums relentlessly above our heads, making our burrow almost vibrate. Thunder bellows in the sky and we quiver with every flash of lighting painting momentary shadows on our wall. We listen to the wind as it roars across the grass and spirals along the cliff; we hear the ocean throw itself against the rock in a violent frenzy. We hear the rock and earth giving way.

The sun’s rays pierce through the brightening cloud in streaks of pale yellow across the sky, highlighting our grassy cliff in shifting shades of gold and green. This is the first sun since the rain stopped. My head emerges from our burrow as my partner lands in front of me with laden beak. She drops her catch on the grass in front of me and, methodically, I eat the herrings one by one. We hear a keening on the breeze, raspy and low. Some burrows caved in while the pairs were out fishing, the dirt that built them softened and weakened irreparably by the rain. It’s too late in the season to lay another egg. Our usually loud colony falls silent of any other sound. Twisting its way between the burrows and echoing in our minds, the keening continues through the night. This didn’t happen last year.

- - -

I bob atop the waves and our nesting island, just a line on the horizon, slips in and out of view as I float between the peaks and valleys of the waves. I’ve never needed to fly this far out before, and my beak is almost full already. There aren’t any sand eels for me to catch, only herrings, and they might be too big. We’ve never had this happen before. I preen, beak teasing oil through my feathers and coating each and every one. The sun starts to set behind me; I take off, headed home, as the waves splash around me.

As soon as I duck my head into our burrow, I hear the insistent peeping of our puffling, now more than a moon old and almost ready to fledge. He meets me at the burrow’s entrance, grey and brown bill illuminated for a moment by the dying sun, then he turns and goes back in; I follow. The light grey fluff that rings him like a skirt is dotted with sticks and leaves and adult feathers starting to push through. I pull a root, caught on the spines, from his beak as he turns to face me and I set down my catch on the ground in front of him. I knock my beak against his, my white face in stark contrast with his more ashen one. I could only find herring today. I pick up the smallest fish from the pile by its tail and offer it to him; he takes it from me and swallows. Good. But all the other fish are bigger. I pick up a second and he takes it in his beak, struggling to swallow. It simply won’t fit; it’s too big.

We didn’t want to, but we leave him alone. We have to fly so much farther to find food that we can only make two trips a day. It isn’t enough. Soon he’ll be fledging and he needs to eat. The herrings we catch are usually too big for him to swallow, and we can’t let him starve. We won’t let him starve. So today, we hunt. Both of us. Grey surrounds us in the matte sheet of clouds above us and its reflection in the too-calm sea below. I look down and watch my flight mirrored in the waves, just a silhouette against a canvas sky.

Like countless needles, rain spits down and bounces off my back and wings. I’ve never seen it rain this much. The ocean, agitated, is patterned with irregular ripples from the memory of raindrops, repeated with each and every breath. I dive for a final time, snapping the surface tension and quieting the staccato rain as I submerge, but there are no fish to find; I dive as deep as the cliff is high, but the sea is empty. I surface and bob for only a moment as the rain redoubles before taking off. The splashed prints I leave behind meld with the growing rain as I take flight. With each wingstroke, it seems, the rain gets stronger. We’ve never had this many storms before fledging. Each raindrop slides off my feathers, flicked into the air behind me, even as they land in increasing numbers. Our nesting island, which sat so clearly on the horizon before me, blurs with each passing minute, obscured by the thrashing rain. Lightning streaks across the sky and hurled thunder snarls on its heels. Instinctively, I dip to fly closer to the water. The peaks of the waves bite at the air between us, their crests growing ever taller, ever fiercer, ever closer.

Keening, small sound though it is, fills my ears as it snakes through the beating, pounding percussion of the rain on my back. I know this sound. I land, almost crashing, on the grass, spraying a half circle of mud across the ground, and rush to my partner’s side. Her beak, colors long since blocked out, knocks once against my own, frantic, and leaves a muddy print. She goes back to digging in the dirt. I coo gently, then louder, asking why. My too-small catch drops from my beak as it dawns on me and I start to dig too. Dirt fills my nostrils and cakes my bill. Mud, like spittle, mars my feathers and leaves streaks across my face like horizontal tears. I can’t find the entrance to our burrow.

Frantically, we dig. Other pairs do the same. Kicking with our feet, we try desperately to scrape away the sliding, falling mud and dirt. We push the soft earth with our beaks; we try and shovel our way to the entrance. But with the rain still beating down, everything we do is in vain. The ground is too soft. Any progress we make is undone by the tireless, inevitable rain. Still we dig. What else can we do but dig.

The rain starts to slow, the space between the droplets growing. We keep digging. As the earth dries, our efforts are made good. Bur our burrow’s front caved in. We dig our way to the back, to where our puffling sleeps, forging our way through mush and mud. He’s there. Covered in not-yet-drying mud with feathers horribly askew and almost indistinguishable from the burrow around him, he’s there. My partner chuffs from deep in her throat and hurries to his side. Water pools on the ground around him, dyed brown, and the ground gives way, sloshing, beneath her feet. She coos and taps her beak against his, preening his feathers and knocking dirt from his wings. He doesn’t react. I come up beside them and do the same; I coo with my beak against his and pull pebbles from his feathers. We hear keening on the wind from across the colony—a pair. My partner nudges our puffling gently and pushes his head towards me. It falls back. Another pair starts to keen. I rub my head against the top of his as my partner grooms his puffling down, still shedding before he fledges. There’s more keening now. I push against his beak with mine, matching now in brown hues, to wake him up. I do it again, harder, more insistent, more desperate. He doesn’t move. My partner starts to keen. This wouldn’t have happened last year. I join my partner’s keening, the sound like sandpaper in my chest as it tears a hole in my center. The wind carries our mourning chorus over the cliff and out to sea, a final family melody. This didn’t happen last year.