Field Notes, northern Iceland, July 2022.

Their mother screams overhead as the babies are pulled from the wine box. The wind is blowing, and we sit on a rocky outcrop in the chilly summer sun. I block its light with my hand to get a glimpse of the female soaring above: her snowy white coat barred with black smudges, her tail fanned out like a piece of ancient artwork. I direct my attention back to the chicks. They are three: silvery, ugly, and hunched together. One clicks its beak at us and threatens to bite the hand reaching towards it.

The birds are beautiful, the landscape foreign to me, and yet I am captivated by the handler. He is quiet, deft. He scaled the cliffside with his son and granddaughter to retrieve the gyrfalcon from their precarious nest. I can tell that he knows more than he says, a respite from the others who buzz around me. I am hanging on his every word. He speaks only when spoken to. Forty years, he says. He knows every nest on the island.

I am mesmerized as the scene unfolds: the chicks are measured, banded, and returned to their nest to be monitored until adulthood. The progeny of one of four hundred breeding pairs in Iceland. Later, he pulls the cached bones from his bag and sifts through them with breakneck speed. I reflect on his skill, on life: to become an expert, to spend years of your life observing, following, chasing, to be more at peace with the company of wild birds than with talkative humans. A rock tumbles and in an instant my reverie is over, and I hurry down the trail to catch up.