It was a bitter cold night in March 2015 when a certain sage-grouse female’s (SGF) life changed forever. That night she was designated “SGF4601” and thereafter, her movements would be closely monitored for the rest of her life. After being gently captured, she was fitted with a GPS “backpack” and released. Until her death four years later, her life was scrutinized by biologists, adding to our understanding of sage-grouse behaviors and their habitat. –Morelli, “A Year in the Life of an Idaho Sage-Grouse”

When I awoke, I was different. Or the world I lived in had changed. Or both.

Something was behind me, over me, on me. I could not see it, but I could feel it covering me so I knew it was there—something with a thin, hard-edged shape that I could not slip free of or away from, try as I might. And not only that but there was something else hard wrapped around me below; when I curved my body to look at it, I could see it had a pattern of marks or scratches across its own curved shape. Later I would discover that I could not pry or break it off, no matter how many times I picked at it, dashed it against stones, or roughly plunged it down into mounds of snow and ice. It, too, had been tightened around me. Behind me, below me, unyielding, unforgiving: these things were not part of me, not part of what I had known before. What were they?

Then I remembered: the terror of the moment when I lost, forever, the world as I knew it. Lights brighter than any sun blazed up out of nowhere shortly after our group settled down to roost for the night, and noise far louder than thunder left us reeling, unable to fly, let alone flee. As we struggled to get our bearings in the blinding din, a web of some kind came down over us; it was like a cliff face that we could not see, some barrier that we could look through but that blocked us at every turn. It also kept changing its shape, pulled tighter and tighter around us, shrinking in as we sought a way out. I had made myself small beneath hedges in ferocious storms, tucked under the grass as the shadow of a hawk prowled across the sky, become absolutely still after glimpsing a fox in the near distance. This time, though, there was no possibility of escape, no means of evasion, no pathway leading toward the horizon.   

Then the large, pale animals came closer, clumsy and loud in their movements but unafraid, it seemed, of the danger of being heard, hunted, found. One of them, plucking me from the web I was still struggling against, locked me in its powerful grip. I grew confused when it made no motion to crush or kill me. Yet it held me so tightly that I could not move at all; every part of me was held fast in that grasp. It was then that I felt the thing covering me from behind, with its thin, hard-edged shape. A moment later, I was turned upside down, face up to where the sky should have been, had my view of it not been blocked by the unyielding grip. Another of the creatures tightened the second, curved thing below me, or rather above me, given that I was being held upside down. 

Suddenly the grip loosened, and I was loose as well, turning toward the horizon whose presence I could sense even though it was nighttime. I flew off in that direction as best I could, still stunned by the blinding lights, the crashing noise, the invisible web and relentless grip, and what had been done to me, tightened around me. I landed in a meadow I had used as a hiding-spot before, and waited for dawn.

Now, many moon cycles later, the presence of the horizon dims and a shadow I know I can’t escape hovers over me, the cold, dry ground giving way to ever wider, ever longer swaths of darkness. I wish I could say that I fully recovered after that terrifying night, that I regained my bearings, returned to where—and who—I had been, after sheltering in the meadow; but I never did. What happened, what I remembered, had carved a canyon into my mind. On one side of the canyon, unhindered flight, ready means of evasion, the feeling (I later realized) of never having been stunned, gripped, and encased in strange shapes. On the other side, a world darkened by mystery, by constricted flight and uneasy perches, by an unsought encounter with the pale, clumsy animals, who, as it turned out, did crush me, with the things they tightened around me, behind and below.

Why did they do it? Why did they divide me, separating before from after, and replace the familiar world with its absence? Ever since I spent that night in the meadow trying to cross back to the other side, find that lost line of flight, I’ve never stopped wondering—and waiting for the dawn.

Sources

Connelly JW, Reese KP, Schroeder MA. 2003. Monitoring of Greater Sage-Grouse Habitats and
Populations. Publication No. 979 of the College of Natural Resources Experiment Station. Moscow,
ID: University of Idaho College of Natural Resources, 2003. Available:
https://wdfw.wa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/01316/wdfw01316.pdf.

Morelli, S. “A Year in the Life of an Idaho Sage-Grouse.” 2022. Bureau of Land Management website.
Available: https://www.blm.gov/blog/2022-06-23/year-life-idaho-sage-grouse.

Severson JP, et al. 2019. “Global Positioning System Tracking Devices Can Decrease Greater Sage-Grouse
Survival.” The Condor 121.3. Available:
https://academic.oup.com/condor/article/121/3/duz032/5535847?login=false.

Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Institute. n.d. “What is Bird Banding?” Available:
https://nationalzoo.si.edu/migratory-birds/what-bird-banding.

Author’s Note: “Autoethnography of the Tracked” presents an account of what it’s like for a bird to be captured, fitted with monitoring devices, and tracked—from the imagined perspective of the bird. It explores how humans can harm other animals even while ostensibly working to protect them. This a hybrid piece that blends several genres, including nonfiction (conservationist discourse), fiction, and authoethnography, which itself blends autobiography and memoir with ethnographic description.