Writing in a Small Font

About Cats and Birds and Other Things That Catch on Each Other

I’d like to write it in small font:

I’m getting a divorce.

I’m getting a divorce and it’s breaking my heart.

I’m getting a divorce and it’s the right thing to do, even though both of us still love each other and respect each other and enjoy spending time with each other. We want the best for each other, and the best for each other is not each other. Not as a spouse, anyway.

I’ve written before about our cat Malka, in Wilding Out At Home and Tapping Out.

We got Malka twelve years ago now, on the Thanksgiving after we married. I had grown up with a dog and a whole parade of cats, and really wanted a cat of my own, but Michael hadn’t grown up with pets and was questioning their appeal. “So you scoop their poop,” he’d say. “And you feed them. And you do this because they’re fuzzy?”

“Yes,” I’d say. “And sometimes they butt their head against you. Or fall asleep with their tongue out.”

Our cat, I realized then, required some skills in diplomacy, and it look a couple of trips to the rescue center to find the right one: Kangaroo. Kangaroo (as she was then named) was a little furry combustion engine of purrs and cuddles, about a year old they said. (We now think she was older.) We took her home, and the moment she jumped on Michael’s lap and nuzzled him, he was a gonner.

I’m writing a longer essay about Malka and birds and marriage, and I’ve included an excerpt below. Before I do, though, you might like to know a couple things:

First, if you aren’t following the enormous increase in wolf kills around Yellowstone National Park in the 2021-2022 season, I regret being the person who’s bringing you the terrible news. Science Magazine says that “the killing of more than 500 wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming in recent months—including nearly 20% of the wolves that sometimes range outside of Yellowstone National Park—threatens to undermine a decades-old effort to restore the predators to the landscape and disrupt a long-term Yellowstone research project that has produced influential findings on how wolves help shape ecosystems.” The New Yorker has an excellent article about it, “Killing Wolves to Own the Libs?”

Second, Thomas Pluck in his terrific newsletter, What Pluckery is This, mentioned re-wilding land and this article on an Irishman who inherited a bunch of land and let it go wild. I’d like to talk more about that sometime — I don’t know much about it, but I do remember a passage from Braiding Sweetgrass  that implied it doesn’t always work? Sometimes the vegetation comes back, but not with the biodiversity it once had? At any rate, let me know if you know anything about re-wilding land in the comments.

And finally, the National Arboretum bald eagles, Mr. President and Lady of the United States (Lotus for short), have had a chick! (This is a big relief after their first chick tragically died.) You can see the furry little cutie on this webcam.

Hope you all have a wanderful week.

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The essay excerpt:

When I put up the bird feeder on the railing outside my apartment’s sliding glass window, I thought I might name the birds that came to feed there.  It would be nice to think of myself as the kind of person who knows nature so intimately that she can tell one sparrow from the next. Indeed, when it became clear that my marriage was falling apart, I had been tempted to move to the Puget Sound and volunteer for a similar project: helping with whale identification for marine research organization.

They have scientists who do the actual field work with the whales. This volunteer position, instead, would have meant processing the pictures of the wales and tagging the whales with their “names” based on their spots. The scientific names consist of a letter for the pod, and a number for the individual, so a particular whale’s name might be J34, for instance.

They have so many people who want to do this that you have to commit to the position for at least four months, if not longer, and I imagined myself, ascetic and peaceful, doing nothing all day but looking at picture of a whale after picture of a whale and tagging them by their pad but really, in my head, I would think, “this is Nancy,” or, “will you look where Roger ended up.” I guess I thought I could live on the proceeds of half of what our DC house was worth, and I was probably right that that might last a couple of years or even more if I was careful, but I have no idea what I would have done afterwards.

That life didn’t happen. My family’s on the east coast, I wasn’t ready to quit my job, and it seemed that there was a chance my husband and I might be able to work it out after all. So I stayed in DC but rented an apartment and put up a bird feeder, mostly to entertain the cat.

She was moving from a house to a fourth-floor apartment, so suddenly, there would be no dogs with their walkers to watch out the window, no squirrels to stare down. There was nothing that would, at indeterminate intervals, cause her to loose high-pitched squeals of hunter’s lust.

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Some technical news: if you have an iPhone and are willing to download another app, you can now read WanderFinder in the new Substack app for iPhone.

With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for WanderFinder and any other Substack newsletters you might subscribe to. I’ve just started using the app myself, and I feel like reading & commenting are a little easier.

The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.