By Anthony Graves

I can't recall the precise year, but it must have been somewhere around 1973 or '74 when I was 13 or 14. My father knew that Dennis banded birds in the fall and he would drop me off, ostensibly to help Dennis. A lot of banders would mist net birds in the spring, but Dennis didn't like to do that because it might interfere with their breeding migration. So he netted during the fall migration, early on September and October mornings. I would arrive in the dark, but I never got there earlier than Dennis so I don't know exactly what he did to set up. I remember the banding station that had a table. On the table were bands in their little bins, different sizes, silver and all numbered with an individual number. And there were special pliers that just closed the band without touching or hurting the bird's leg. We never dared to touch those tools or bands.

It was often cold, sometimes with a hard frost adding silver coloring to the gold of the marsh at dawn. You could see your breath in the still darkness and sometimes my feet would get very cold. The nets were strung along narrow lanes cut through the high tide bush at the landward edge of the marsh. Dennis liked the marsh/woods interface and the birds liked it too. There wasn't much talk and what talk there was happened in low tones and with a minimum of words. It seemed like to talk would not only scare the birds we were trying to catch but also shatter the beauty dawn on the marsh invariably produced.

We'd go along the path at the end of the lanes, stopping at each net to raise the net from its bunched position. When a net was unbunched and spread out vertically on its poles it was invisible. I don't know how Dennis figured out what mesh to use, but it was pretty small - about the diameter of a man's finger. Those nets would catch anything that touched them, to this day I have never encountered any net that could entangle like a mist-net. The lanes were narrow so that birds would fly across them from one side to the other. If you walked too close to the net, as you were likely to do because of the narrowness of the lane, invariably your jacket or sleeve or watch would get caught and it would be minutes of untangling before you were free.

Patrolling the lanes and nets was the work of volunteers like me. Dennis would be mostly at the banding station, and we would bring the birds to him. It was a balance of not going too often along the paths, because that would scare the birds and going often enough so that when a bird hit the net and was caught you got to it before it got itself so tangled up that it looked like a big black ball of netting. Those really tangled ones were often the birds we called Dennis for. One of us staying with the bird to keep it warm and try to keep it from struggling, and the other to go get Dennis. He would finish with the bird he was banding, and come along. I remember being cold, but he never had gloves on. He would rarely say much, but would approach the tangle and take it from you. With a patience that seemed impossible to a child he would untangle the bird, always much faster than you expected. The great thing was to know from which side of the net the bird had hit, because that was the side you wanted to be standing on and it was the side that the bird had to come out on. Invariably Dennis was on the correct side of the net.

We captured many kinds of birds. Swamp Sparrows, Cardinals, Blue Jays, Chicadees…and Warblers. It is mostly the Cardinals and the Warblers that I remember. The Cardinals because of their large bills were perfectly adapted to crushing. They could crush a child's finger or a sunflower seed equally well. I don't remember seeing Dennis ever get crushed by a Cardinal. Either he was too good to let them get ahold of him, or too stoic to acknowledge the pain they inflicted. The warblers I remember because even in their dull fall colors they were like jewels. Their eyes bright, their movements quick and their plumage beautiful. They seemed to be living life much faster than we humans. I remember seeing Dennis holding a Yellow Warbler. His hand was closed about the bird, only its head protruding. I know it was a warm morning because a mosquito landed on the hand Dennis was using to hold the Yellow Warbler. And it after dawn because the warbler was a brilliant yellow in the early morning sun. The mosquito on Dennis's hand began searching for a place to bite, catching the eye of the Warbler. In an instant the Yellow Warbler had turned its head and eaten the mosquito. It was inconceivable to me that a tiny bird grasped within the fist of a man could so forget its predicament to the point that it would eat. I saw it as statement of both the need for fuel that the bird had after who knows how many hours of flight high in the night sky, and the calm and quiet that Dennis brought to the way he handled the birds while he briefly interrupted their journey south.

(Paintings by Dennis Puleston, A Nature Journal, 1992)