One evening this week I stood on a viewing platform at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge in California’s Great Central Valley. To the
east the moon, two days from full, silvered the ponds of the refuge. Westward,
sunset light on the water was greenish gold and the sky a blaze of fiery red. I
was there to view the fly-out, a nightly spectacle during the winter months
when hundreds of thousands of geese move from the ponds to the fields to forage.
A clatter of wings, flashes of white as nearby snow geese lifted. All around me
was the sound of their calling. Everywhere I looked, huge skeins of geese scribbled
ragged black lines on the red sky.
As writers who care about nature, we have many ways to
share such an experience. We could do a straight science story about bird
migration and the importance of the Pacific Flyway. The story might be part of
a social history: the loss of wetlands since European settlement and the
struggles to balance the needs of agriculture and the needs of waterfowl. We
could use the scene as part of a fiction, to establish location or show an
aspect of character. Maybe it becomes a poem. There might even be a political
aspect in the fact that the first ditches for the refuge were dug in 1937 by
the Civilian Conservation Corps, a work relief program that was part of FDR's
New Deal legislation.
Whatever the genre of our writing, our job is to bear
witness. Our readers must be there with us, feeling the wonder of that sky full
of birds, feeling with us the humbling majesty of the natural world.
Maureen Eppstein
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