I have a kind of game I play with grief, imagining the birds I see are the people I’ve lost.
When my identical twin brothers died unexpectedly — one to heart failure 20 years ago, one to suicide more recently — words deserted me in those first days of grief. I found, though, that if I could get out the door with my camera and into a landscape that called to me, I thankfully could still photograph.
For me, that landscape is South Dakota, where I moved with my father, mother and younger sister when I was 15 years old and where my parents lived for more than 50 years.
My brother Dave is a belted kingfisher (shared quirky fashion sense); his twin, Mike, is a Townsend’s solitaire (complicated yet unforgettable song). Seeing either of these species while out birding in South Dakota makes me smile — that same half-smile of my brothers’ that often accompanied their gently teasing senses of humor.
A year ago, my father died at home weeks shy of his 105th birthday. As much as you might imagine that you’re prepared for a parent’s death, you never really are.
What bird should a father be? In particular, what bird should Dad be, a family doctor of few words who taught me how to look closely at the natural world and who shared my love of raptors, grassland birds and songbirds, especially cedar waxwings.
When I went home early last spring for my dad’s memorial service, I began and ended each day by birding. I often heard the waxwing’s faint, high-pitched calls overhead in the darkening junipers during my late afternoon walks. More often than not, these birds are communal and are known to pass berries from beak to beak along the branch of a chokecherry or other berry-producing tree. On that visit, the flock remained unseen.
Sometimes, when I think of the loss of my family, I find it’s enough to look up, as if eyes alone could lift the heart.
That first fall after my brother Dave died in 2006, I wandered restlessly through the prairies and Badlands of South Dakota and photographed. Frame by frame, I focused on a flock of blackbirds in a field of sunflowers, a bison in my car’s rearview mirror, as I learned to navigate my first loss of an immediate family member. Frame by frame, it was as if the Great Plains held in my viewfinder also held me.
Over the years, I’ve continued to find solace in the space and silence and solitude of the northern Great Plains, with their ever-shifting weather and high winds that seem to come out of nowhere. And early spring, as Dakotans know, can bring blizzards as well as blossoms.
So, that’s why when I arrived at the Rapid City airport late last March, I made sure that my rental S.U.V. had an ice scraper and snow brush, and that in the absent-mindedness of grieving, I’d remembered to pack my boots, my long underwear and, perhaps most important, my dog-eared copy of Tomas Tranströmer’s “The Half-Finished Heaven.” One of my favorite poetry books, it’s long been my emotional and spiritual compass.
Staying at my friend’s ranch a few nights before my dad’s service, I awoke at 3 a.m. I opened my eyes to a rectangle of light. Like a lens, it held my gaze.
Through the bedroom window, I could see the outline of a cottonwood tree just east of the house. And something else caught my eye — a dark figure lit from the side by a porch light that I’d unintentionally left on. Its shape was unmistakable. After staying at the ranch dozens of times over the past 20 years, I’d never been this close to one of its local residents — a great horned owl. In the heart of winter, a pair of these raptors often nests in the windbreak of junipers sheltering the simple white house.
Half asleep, I looked east out the bedroom window. There was no light yet on the horizon. Beyond the owl and the cottonwood lay the prairie. And beyond the prairie lay more dark prairie.
I kept returning to the Tranströmer lines I was rereading the night before, an ending that could very well have been a beginning:
And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: “I am not empty, I am open.”
Looking far into the gray-blue expanse of prairie, the eyes can almost see the vast inland sea that was.
In the lightless bedroom, I reached into my camera bag. My fingers grazed a half-moon shape just below my Leica: a headlamp that I’d bought on a whim the summer before. I was taken by the red-light option — easier on the eyes than a harsh white light — to navigate the darkness. “Maybe the red light won’t spook the owl,” I thought. That, and the fortunate fact that the great horned owl, perched on a clothesline, had its back to me.
Careful not to startle this creature of such superior hearing, I quietly edged closer to the window, which I’d cracked open a few inches the night before, hoping to hear one of those fugitive hoots I adore. I gingerly propped the headlamp against the worn screen and flipped the switch. The owl glowed red.
Slowly, the raptor turned its great head and stared at me. I was stunned to meet the gaze of a one-eyed owl, who bore a scar where its second eye should have been. It was frightening yet oddly familiar. It was as if I were looking into the one good eye of my father, whose left eye had been swollen nearly shut, virtually sightless from decades of glaucoma. The father who died in my younger sister’s arms. The father to whom I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.
Was that rain or sleet ticking the window like tiny stones?
The owl’s one good eye held me in its gaze. Time and space seemed to thicken, as if water separated our two worlds.
Even a grieving heart knows how to float. Drifting closer, I pushed the shutter.
Rebecca Norris Webb’s books include “My Dakota” and “A Difficulty Is a Light.” Her upcoming book, “Glimmerings,” a selection of 30 years of her color photographs, will be released in fall 2027.
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