A Complete Birding Guide for Montana

I found the bird the day my daughter lost her words. She opened her mouth, eyes unblinking and innocent as the cows in the meadow. How strange and instinctive to ascribe innocence to cows—bodies with no real sense of morality or repercussion. Strange that my daughter could no longer dredge words from her throat, could no longer find them in her mind. Just gone. But we knew: sometimes this abandonment of words occurred slowly, sometimes not.

I had known this would happen for some time—it was only a matter of when. I knew there was no escape, even though we had fled all sense of people and infrastructure, had taken refuge in the Centennial Valley in Montana, called this flat land eclipsed with mountains our home. No way to know where the silence came from, the way it crept into our bodies and made that inexplicable change to our minds.

I knew I too would lose my words, my mind becoming something else, tongue curling into dust. And we—my daughter and I—were the lucky ones, who had lasted this long and still maintained our words. Or perhaps, unlucky to have witnessed so many others lose theirs. Unlucky to still have the words to try to make sense of this, to try to give it a name.

This is what I'm doing—trying to make sense of this. Hoping that by placing words onto an experience, I can master it through description. By that I mean: understand. It's important to name things, it's important to know things' names.

I found the bird first thing in the morning, when I flung open the door to my cabin. By "first thing" I mean the first thing outside the cabin, because within it I had already discovered my daughter was silent. That morning I had woken her, asked her what she wanted for breakfast, and was met only with my reflection in her wide eyes. I had opened the door in hopes to find some refuge, because within the cabin was panic. Within was darkness, her silence, my unknowing. What now.

The bird welcomed me, still and quiet on the wood-planked porch. As long as my palm, black and white specked with a violent yellow plume at the nape. A hint of red around the face, which I initially thought was blood, but soon realized wasn't. Fitting that death should come to me that day, because I was no longer whole, no longer wholly in words. Because my daughter, half my biologic code, was already lost.

I've never believed in karma, in god, or some judicious force in the world, but that morning I felt as if the bird had been left for me on purpose. Perhaps we only find meaning where we can. Perhaps our word-filled thoughts shift our realities to help us grieve. After all this loss, I'm more willing to shed my skepticism and find beauty and meaning where I can.

A dead bird isn't beautiful, only it is, incredibly, almost more beautiful than in life, because you can closely examine each color, the exact slope of its body. My daughter was instantly drawn to it. She had always loved nature. When she stepped onto the porch, she immediately bent her body to study it. She reached out a hand and I said, No, but she no longer knew this word. I wrapped my arms around her waist and lifted her away from the bird. Normally she would have cried, filled her lungs with air to dispel it as displeasure, but even this was denied her. She was soundless, silent, eyes wide with shock. But still, she thrashed as I carried her from the bird. I was thankful for that movement. She had always been a bustling body of noise, but her silence made her seem unreal, no longer my daughter. If she hadn't moved, I would have felt like I was carrying a corpse.

I was no stranger to this sense of death that occurred when people lost their words. It's all we...