One morning a few years ago, an orange-crowned warbler was working through a small stand of sage scrub on a field at Madrona Marsh when I came across it. Warblers move rapidly, searching through vegetation for the small invertebrates that make up much of their diet. While some warblers bear flashy colors and bold field marks, orange-crowns will have none of that. Drab is just fine, and, as many birders will tell you, their best field mark is that they don’t have any field marks. And good luck to seeing the eponymous orange crown. That is rarely shown.

Like most of their kin, orange-crowned warblers are skittish, moving away from the unknown. On this particular morning, that would have been me with my first digital camera, a Sony 707 that had a phenomenally good Zeiss lens. I moved cautiously, looking for an open sight line. Suddenly, “my” bird hopped up onto a clump of coast goldenbush, turned for a quick look, then flew off. Perhaps it was done foraging in this patch of shrubby growth. Perhaps it preferred a more private place. Either way, I had taken a couple of pictures that I hoped would prove usable in slide shows. I thought no more of the incident; all just part of taking pictures. And there were more birds to photograph that morning.

I was unprepared for the image on the computer screen. The colors were muted--greens, yellow, browns—but there was nothing muted, nothing drab about the bird frozen in that moment by my camera. I had done more than capture a photograph of an orange-crowned warbler. Here was clearly a fellow creature full of an awareness of the world every bit the equal of mine. It’s glance spoke of an intelligence though certainly not human, equally visceral.

That image is now never very far from my thinking about our world. It shows why humanity is not apart from nature, but because we are so dominant, must take special care in how we exercise that dominance. A print of it hangs in my living room; among the fifteen collages, paintings and photographs, the only bird.