It was not a bird call she recognized. Hyooo. Owlesque with a hint of mourning dove. Hyooo. Notes of tin whistle and teakettle. Fading at the end, like a crying baby tossed down a well. HYOOOooo.

What was it? All around, the same old birds sang the same old songs, juncos and titmice and chickadees. She took out her phone, but even its miraculously accurate bird call app could not identify the sound. Stupid Phoebe and the stupid birding club would know the answer, but she would never deign to ask. Forget them. She was a solo birder now.

She sneezed. Twice. Three times.

It would be just her luck, to sneeze so loud as to scare away an exciting mystery bird. And birds were so rarely a mystery; they were well-documented and classified down to the feather. There were countless recordings of their various noises, and millions of images of their distinct markings, though her old pocket guide only had enough room to show the males. The rest, she had learned from Phoebe, who knew all the gender-specific folklore—the female was slightly larger, the female had subtler plumage, the female had a black mustache. She was embarrassed to think how she had idolized Phoebe and her expansive avian knowledge. The traitor.

Hyooo. It could be a new bird to her—a lifer—or, it could be a new bird to the world. Phoebe and the girls would never believe it. And yes, they were girls. Middle-aged girls, the worst kind. She thought they were friends but they turned on her so fast. All because she had used audio playback—just one time!—to entice a Northern Parula out of the treetops. They had glared at her with black goose eyes of judgment. Phoebe pulled her aside, whispered that it was against Association guidelines to disturb the birds with audio playback, and she should please not do it again. She was gobsmacked by the reprimand. Didn’t ornithologists in the Galapagos do the exact same thing, to summon a nearly extinct kingfisher? Didn’t the scientific community celebrate their achievement? It’s not like she murdered the poor thing for display in the museum, like the Galapagos ornithologists had done. Killed it just to prove it was alive.

From that moment, Phoebe was dead to her. Who made her queen of the woods, anyway?

Hyooo.

As if to say, Yooouuu. Yes, you. And why not her? Why couldn’t she discover a new species right there in upstate New York? They would name it after her. There would be a big press conference, followed by a gala. She’d drape herself in teal sequins to stand out on the red carpet. The girls wouldn’t be invited, obviously, which would get their binoc straps in a twist. Phoebe would beg her to lecture at the next club meeting, and she’d say: “No, I’m afraid I can’t make it that day. I’m keynote speaker at the Association conference. The Association. Ever heard of it?”

Oh, it was all right there in front of her, like that night at Girl Scout Camp so many summers ago. The older girls instructed her to go into the woods to hunt a furry wingéd snipe, told her to stomp in a circle and squawk a terrible squawk to lure it close. So squawk she did, until she was dizzy, determined to be the first person on earth to successfully catch a snipe in her empty dandruffed pillowcase. She was certain she saw its eyes glow in the dark, one ruby and one emerald, bright as her future friendships once they all saw how special she was. But the creature did not emerge. She was furious at her failure, and then, when it was all revealed to be a big joke, ashamed of her gullibility. A yellow bus coughed up a new group of campers and she regained a smidgen of dignity when she ordered them into the woods to repeat the prank, regurgitating her shame into their trusting little mouths.

Hyooo.

It was right on top of her. But where?

Hyooo.

She took a slow video with her phone, panning the canopy and the brush, looking for the impossible, hoping, holding her breath. When she finally inhaled there it was—Hyooo—coming from inside of her, fluting through her own mucoused nostril. No, no, that couldn’t be. Maybe that one particular noise escaped from her nasal cavity that one particular time, but the earlier ones—no. No. She blew her nose into an ancient clod of tissue and stood there. The bird was gone. Only cardinals in the pines, red and green, red and green.