NONFICTION
ALICE HOTOPP
OR MOONLIGHT
The high mountain valley echoes with amber light. It is that moment between sunset and nightfall when the world is an ember. My skin prickles in the alpine breeze. Behind me, the windows of the hut are warm and welcoming, but I want to feel the last moments of the day before going inside. I sit next to a kindly-looking man at a bench facing the slope down to the valley. As the peaks turn a soft indigo and the stars a sharp white, we chat about his grown kids, the annual trips he makes to these mountains with his wife. I tell him that my husband and I are hiking hut-to-hut for our honeymoon. Do you have children? He asks. No, I say, and surprising myself, I add, but maybe soon.
In recent years, when seeing a toddler in the backpack of a hiker, I feel the weight of the pack resting on my own hips, hear the coos and gurgles in my own ears. I imagine setting the baby, my baby, on its unsteady feet so it can look at ferns and mosses, splash in a puddle. Then I imagine the world when that child is 10. 25. 50. I think of the coastline and islands of Maine, my home, lost under the Atlantic. Summer skies glowing orange with wildfire smoke. Trees snapping in roaring winds, mud-thick rivers breaking their banks and swallowing towns, farmlands wallowing in never-ending rain. The homesickness of growing up in the Northeast as it loses its snowy winters, its maple trees and their sweet sugar, and its moose grazing along lakeshores. I think of the physical and political dangers of living within a destabilized climate—food and water insecurity, the spread of infectious diseases, the perilous paths awaiting the millions who will be forced to flee their homes. And I think of the sparrows.
Specialist species are those who thrive in a narrow range of environmental conditions. They may lay their eggs upon the leaves of one type of plant. They may eat the flesh of one animal species. They may have a limited geographic range, one precisely defined by the contours of a habitat—valleys with a particular soil type, or mountaintops above a certain elevation, or a network of streams with water of a specific acidity. Often, specialist species cannot survive without these bonds to community and place.
Tidal marsh sparrows, three species within the genus Ammospiza (meaning “sand” and “finch” in ancient Greek), are specialists of tidal saltmarsh habitats. These environments are strung along North America’s Atlantic shores like a necklace of emerald beads, islands of green between stretches of sandy, rocky, and urban coastline. Saltmarshes themselves require certain conditions for survival. They form where rivers kiss the sea, growing from accumulation of sediments carried downstream in the bellies of the rivers. These sediments are sewn together by the roots of salt-tolerant grasses, forming the soft platform of the marsh. Low-lying sections of the marsh are flooded in daily high tides. The higher regions of marshes only flood during the monthly full and new moons, times when the moon’s gravitational pull on the oceans is strengthened by the alignment of the moon with the sun. This cyclical flooding keeps the marshes alive, preventing them from growing into forests. Saltmarshes and their sparrows exist in this liminal breath between land and sea, growth and loss, moon and sun.
I spent three summers studying the Acadian subspecies of Nelson’s sparrows, A. nelsoni subvirgata, in Downeast Maine for my dissertation. Three summers of waking before dawn to search for nests and string up mist-nets, the sheer, lightweight nets used to safely capture birds. Three summers of dreading the full moon.
Imagine a swath of green, swaying grasses. You are flitting through the forest of their stems. Their blades arc overhead, forming a thatched canopy against a relentlessly blue sky. The air of brine and decay and saltmarsh muck is thick and rich in your mouth. The mud is cool and gritty between your clawed toes. Here, in this jade-tinted world, is where you, Nelson’s sparrow, build your nest—a clementine-sized cup of last year’s dead grasses woven into the sturdy stems of this year’s live grasses.
Nelson’s sparrows return from their southern wintering grounds to more northerly saltmarshes in late May or early June each year. The females get to work, weaving circles into the grasses and mating and laying their oblong eggs; one each day for four to five days. And then they wait, using their bodies to protect their eggs from noon sun and misty nights. The June moon swells full. As the evening high tide rises, seawater crests the marsh’s mud-slick banks, flooding its lowest reaches first. You, mother sparrow, shield your eggs. You hear the advancing sea trickling between grass stems; sense it in the salt-soaked air. Yet, you wait until the flood waters breach the walls of your nest before escaping to higher ground. Your eggs, and the eggs of the other mothers, bob in the dark night. Many wash away as the tide ebbs. Most of those that remain in the nests, cold and water-logged, will never hatch.
When the moon and tides wane and the marsh is again awash with sun, the weaving and mating and laying begin anew. The males perform their flight displays with vigor, rising in a high parabola and letting loose their raspy song as they descend. This time, the sparrows are starting their nests with just enough time for their next clutch to hatch and fledge before the July full moon. If the timing is perfect, if the coastal storms are kind, if the raccoons’ noses miss the scent of the nests, the chicks will fledge. If not—the cycle begins again when the July high tide fades.
The specialist tidal marsh sparrows are adapted to this tidal flooding. They build their nests just above the flood line and just below the sight line of predators; they can renest up to three times in a summer if a nest is lost. Yet, as the ocean levels rise, the window between the spring tides is narrowing. The sparrows have fewer precious days for their young to hatch and fledge before the next flood.
During my research, I looked to the moon each evening, feeling a knot of dread as it neared full. In my head I ticked through the nests we had found--Will the chicks in the nest in the rushes be old enough to fledge before the flood? The nest by the stream won’t make it…it’s too close to the water and those chicks haven’t even opened their eyes yet. On mornings after a spring tide, I held my breath as I walked through the sodden marsh, steeling myself when reaching the small tuft of grass hiding each nest. Sometimes, the tension in my neck eased when I parted the grass and found the chicks warm and dry, their nest a centimeter or two above the flood line. More frequently, I would swear under my breath, gnawing on my lower lip as I fished their cold bodies from the submerged nest.
Frequent renesting, while an adaptation to a challenging life, seems like a reoccurring nightmare. What beats through the heart of the mother sparrow when her third nest of the summer washes away? Even to write this makes me wince: twice during my research, when checking on a nest the morning after a spring tide, the mother flew off the nest just as we approached. We found a drowned chick inside, one which she had been trying desperately to rewarm.
Were you ready, mother sparrow, to start gathering grass for a new nest just days later? I know that the flooding is not wiped from your mind—sparrows whose nests have flooded have been documented to weave their next nests higher in the grasses. You remember. But while I grieve for your losses, you learn and try again.
~ ~ ~
I can’t believe the pictures my mom is texting to me—water encircling her house, lapping at the front door. I go to visit a few days later, once the roads between her house and mine are finally reopened. Traffic cones mark yawning gaps in the pavement, trees are down everywhere. The field behind my mom’s house is covered in five inches of sand that once formed riverbed. Debris is stuck in tree branches well above my head. A few towns over, people had drowned during the storm while trying to drive over a flooded bridge.
Once the water lowered a bit, I walked down to see the river, my mom tells me. I saw an otter pop its head up from the banks. It looked at me and squeaked. I think it was looking for its partner. She shakes her head, her face tight with loneliness. I wish I could help you, buddy, I told it. I close my eyes, sadness snaking up my gut.
What feels like a lifetime ago, I repeated a question to my dad that I’d heard from other scientists. Is it bad to have kids, to contribute to climate change and habitat loss? My dad, an ecologist and climate change activist, shook his head. Having kids, if that’s what you want, is so central to the human experience. It’s too precious to give up.
Now that he’s gone, I wonder how he would answer me today, a decade closer to missing carbon emission reduction goals, a decade closer to the projected extinction of saltmarsh sparrows. Still, I remember the way the corners of his eyes and mouth would lift when he talked to kids. The curiosity in his voice when he asked them questions, his gentle laugh at their responses. I’m not sure he would have changed his answer.
During my first summer of research, my mom tagged along with the crew for a day of fieldwork. As I’d suggested, she wore her tallest rainboots, quick-dry layers, and a bug head net over a wide-brimmed hat. She helped carry field gear, watched as we set up the mist nets and worked with the birds, and recorded data as we read out wing, bill, and tarsus measurements. After a few hours, we packed up the nets and I invited her to follow me to two small, neon-pink marking flags sunk deep enough in the marsh to be nearly obscured by grass. When we arrived, I parted the grass canopy between the flags and silently pointed into the shadows. My mom stooped to look, pushing back her hat. The broadest smile shone across her face. Days-old chicks chirped up at us, opening their bills to beg for a dragonfly or spider, their newly feathered bodies barely contained by the bulging nest.
That evening we watched the sunset from the rocky shoreline by the field house, sipping ciders. Shadowy silhouettes of islands looked like clouds floating in the glassy, light-filled bay. Our laughter carried across the sky and water as the world glimmered rose, and then deep blue. We thought dad would have loved seeing mom in her marsh outfit; covered in mud and watching through binoculars as sparrows sang from perches on sun-bleached driftwood. He had died just weeks before. We leaned our shoulders together, agreeing that he would have marveled at the life brimming in the tiny nest.
The nest I showed my mom flooded in the next spring tide. The chicks, drowned. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her that their bodies looked like the shriveled, pale curl of my dad’s body in the hospice bed.
~ ~ ~
My grandmother, only in her early 20s, wiped my dad’s infant face with a dishcloth. She lived on an apple farm, and that dishcloth had dried many hands after they picked and processed hundreds of glossy, red apples. They think it was pesticides from the dishcloth that made his new skin slough off, sending him to the hospital.
He recovered, but always thought that this early exposure was what led to the cancer he developed in college. He would walk back and forth to radiation from his apartment, then spend the next few days alone, vomiting. Without telling his parents, he underwent surgery to cut the rampantly dividing cells out of his young body. Again, he recovered. Later, he said that he thought it was the radiation that led to his heart attack in his mid-50s and his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer a few years after.
I wouldn’t have traded our life together for anything, he told my mom. My family was gathered around his hospice bed. His fading eyes glistened with tears. I knew that he meant it—that his love for her and my sister and I was worth more than the number of years lived. The times we had spent together, paddling swift rivers and listening to loon calls and watching otters dive for fish, outshone the illnesses he had endured.
The cancer had spread to his lungs, wrecking their fragile tissues. Drowning him internally. It was difficult for him to speak more than a few words at a time. He wrote us each—his parents, my mom, and my sister and I—final letters in an old notebook. One of the last times I sat with him, he flipped to the page he had written to me. It’s short, he gasped, because we understand each other.
I couldn’t bring myself to read the note until several years after he passed. I’d wanted to save his last words to me, to have one more message yet to read. I finally read it on my 30th birthday. Just one paragraph scrawled by his weakening hand. The last line: Stay in the sunlight (or moonlight) to keep yourself going.
~ ~ ~
Choosing whether to have kids feels very little like a making logical decision. It’s more like stumbling through whatever fog of hormones and fear of regret I’m experiencing a particular week. If I don’t have children, will I be forever haunted by imaginings of teaching them to look for the trailing arbutus flowers come spring, as my parents taught me? When I daydream about baby names the same week Maine suffers a series of life-altering winter storms, am I strapped to the sparrows’ same instinctual drive to reproduce against all odds? What if, like my grandparents, I must say goodbye to a child that is sickened by the same toxins that sicken the planet? Regardless of my decision, am I weaving another circle of loss?
My trepidations are often amplified by friends, op-eds, and podcasts. The ethics of parenthood, if they were ever clear, have been muddied by the cascading consequences of a human-altered climate. We’re all going to drown! A friend exclaims with a despairing laugh in the coffee shop, reading aloud snippets from an article about the east coast sinking under the weight of development, sinking into hollowed-out water tables. Who in their right mind is having kids right now? I shake my head and laugh to cover the defensiveness rising hot to my skin. I’m taken aback by my reaction. Has my body decided something my mind hasn’t yet agreed to? Who in their right mind is having kids right now?
On an achingly cold, windy walk around Portland’s Back Cove, another dear friend and I are (again) hashing and rehashing the parenthood question. In the middle of my tirade on the terrible things that might befall a child born into today’s world, my friend stops me. What are we saying about the parents, who all across the world and all throughout time, have had children in challenging times? Are they bad? Reckless? Selfish? Why does life have to be perfect to warrant more life?
Until this moment, I had been living under the assumption that my children’s lives would—and should—be as good as, if not better than, mine. That this was how good parenting worked. That it was irresponsible to bring children into a life with less stability and fewer resources. My notion of a life worth living had been crafted from within a comfortable, safe nest, over the edges of which I tried not to peer.
What if I were to choose to have children not because life is easy, but because life is hope, in its grittiest form? What if I were to learn from my father, to brim with love and gratitude even when holding fear and pain?
When I tell my husband about my doubts, he listens, but is unphased. He sees things more simply, pointing out the beauty of life despite its challenges. I am baffled by his reassurances that everything will work out, yet I ache to believe them. His confidence seems foolhardy, like when he plans kayaking trips around the maximum number of miles we can travel in one day. But then, if he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have seen the glint of the setting sun on the sea, wouldn’t have heard the wind in the loon’s feathers as it flew overhead at dusk. I wouldn’t have watched him paddling smoothly a few meters ahead of me, silhouetted in gold, wouldn’t have felt my limbs and chest ache with the joy of being ultimately, vibrantly, briefly alive.
He talks about trips along the coast with our kids, teaching them to recognize trees by their leaves and birds by their song. I find myself smiling. I find myself gravitating towards the excitement of a new, uncertain adventure.
~ ~ ~
Spring is here. Soon, the earth will tilt this hemisphere towards the sun, and the sparrows will return. They’ll wing back to the same marshes they nested in the year before. And they’ll begin the cycle again. Many of their eggs and chicks will wash away. But some will clamber to the edge of the nest, flap their wings with a stutter, and fledge.
The feathers of the young sparrows shine with rich black and orange hues, their juvenile plumage more colorful than the muted tones of the adults. When I see them fly over the marsh, identifiable by their bright color and ungainly flight path, I raise a fist in the air for them.
My desire to have kids might be as instinctual, as animal-brained, as the renesting of the sparrows. But is there not something beautiful in that instinct? In that constant leaning towards life and light?
One morning in the marsh, while we put small, numbered aluminum bands on the legs of sparrows to help track their populations, one of the field technicians gasped. Wow. He whispered. She’s gravid. I looked over his shoulder at the bird held tenderly in his palm—beneath her feathers, the lower third of her abdomen was taut, stretched around the curves of an egg. He took her bill and leg measurements with care and then opened his cupped hands. She flew off in the direction of her nest, disappearing into the marsh.
Remembering that morning, I think of the reverent hush that fell over the field team. I think of your gold-ringed eyes, sparrow, the oval egg inside you, the synchrony of your life with the loops of moon, tide, and season.
Not long after the Who in their right mind is having kids right now? moment in the café, I get my IUD removed. After years of being on pause, the doctor warns that my cycles might take a month or two to resume. So a few weeks later, when I see spotting on the toilet paper, I grin. I start tracking my temperature, noting my energy levels and mood, reading about the flows of progesterone and estrogen. Rhythms that were once inconvenient and frightening reminders of my fertility have become fascinating and beautiful and strange and yes, sometimes still a bit frightening. Chemicals throbbing through veins, reproductive cells expelled in purplish blood, organs evolved to stretch around another, growing life—all elements of my body’s quivering animal power. These threads knit me into the ancient, forever fraying, forever renewing tapestry of life. They will always feel mysterious.
The Acadian subspecies of the Nelson’s sparrow, while a tidal marsh specialist, is known to nest in inland fields and cow pastures. This flexibility may allow their populations to persist as sea level rise and coastal development cause saltmarshes to crumble. It is hard for me to imagine Maine’s coast without its wind-swept marshes, without the whispery song of the Nelson’s sparrow falling over them like the sun. But change is coming. Finding some acceptance of, some peace with change might be my only way forward.
I am learning to trust moonlight again. To not recoil from my own changes, my own waxing and waning. To move with the cycles spinning through us all.

Alice is a Maine-based writer and ecologist. Her work explores the intersections of science, beauty, and loss.