My Mom Was for the Birds

I loved her and nature equally. Then I became a teenager.

The mourning dove was in my sights, exposed by a gust of autumn that had taken away all its cover. My mother loved mourning doves. She was the one who had told me that the dove was in fact “mourning” — not a denizen of the “morning” — the naming inspired by the sadness of the bird’s plaintive five-note call. And now, at the problematic age of 14, after a childhood spent birding with my mother, I was taking aim with a pellet gun at one of her favorite birds, considering whether to shoot it dead.

It was the beginning of the 1980s, a time when America was becoming a much harsher place than the eco-friendly ’70s of my early childhood. It was also the dawn of my own harsher adolescent self. What was I doing? I didn’t want to shoot this bird. I loved birds, just as I loved my mother. But I was a teenager, and I had come to feel that everything about my mother and our little rental cottage in the backwoods of uptight Greenwich, Connecticut, was somehow disappointing. If I had to shoot my way out of the disappointment, so be it. As much as I cared about my mother and the birds that were her passion, I wanted to end up with a different life than the one she had lived so far.

She found birds of prey so attractive and her young love…