For The Paris Review, Grace Byron recounts how her obsession with horseshoe crabs began with a visit to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge to spot birds. Her interest veers from curiosity into conservation when she and a couple of friends volunteer for a horseshoe monitoring session with the NYC Bird Alliance. There, they helped log and tag horseshoe crabs emerging from the water at high tide to mate on Plumb Beach.
Agnes and Ashe waited behind, picking up trash as Ann gave us the outline of our night. She kept checking her watch, waiting for the precise moment of high tide: 7:29 P.M. Using two white pipes connected into a square, we prepared to survey the number of horseshoe crabs present that night at random. The pace at which we had to stop and check for critters was a bizarre math problem that I couldn’t quite follow. Meanwhile, two volunteers carried clipboards to note the number of horseshoe crabs in the sample field. I looked around. So far there weren’t so many. As requested, we looked around and grabbed the numbers of those already tagged.
More picks from The Paris Review
Scrabble, Anonymous
“Somehow, doing it with other people took the stain away, made it feel fun instead of abject.”
So Fierce Is the World: On Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman
“I believe we must reinvent loneliness in order to survive it. I have been trying to do this my whole life.”
Recurring Screens
“A screen saver periodically smokes the locusts out, thereby saving the screen from the disfigurement of monotony.”
