Ecology of Feeling
Field Notes & Reflections

The following is a field note written in response to a rare sighting of Cuculus optatus—the Oriental Cuckoo—at Pioneer Dairy Wetlands. It weaves together observational data, habitat description, and fragments from the emotional landscape surrounding the encounter.

 

This piece belongs to a genre I’ve come to think of as intimate fieldwork: a quiet practice of witnessing where both the avian and the human are recorded—not as separate entities, but as two presences momentarily overlapping in the same air.

 

What we notice, and what notices us in return, writes a story neither could tell alone.