Ana had captured him and the other dozen earlier that summer on a grassy inlet on eastern Long Island. She’d gone that day with her federal permits and her black nylon mist nets and four of her students, including Connie. They’d unfurled the nets along the marram grass and guyed fiberglass poles in the sand, and within minutes they’d caught dozens of birds: Spotted Sandpipers, Seaside Sparrows, Willets, a Common Tern. She showed her students how to untangle the birds’ legs from the nylon, and how to hold them firmly (yet gently) in hand. She showed them also how to clip the tiny colored plastic collars—the bands—around the birds’ legs. Ana herself weighed and measured the sparrows and took a pipette of blood from each she was keeping. She released all the other species (a Piping Plover, a Song Sparrow, a Pine Warbler, even a Laughing Gull) but kept a dozen of the baby Savannahs. She stuffed each of them into its own calico bag with a drawstring and set them carefully inside a milk crate. By afternoon, an unexpected squall blew in from the ocean. To keep her young sparrows warm and dry, she stuffed two calico bags down her sweater and nestled them between her breasts.

Her students looked on in horror.

Come on. She nodded at the rest of bags. Tuck in your shirts, and down they go. All of you.

If they wanted to be bird biologists, she explained, they needed to get closer to their subjects.

Dutifully, skeptically (a few squeamishly), they all sunk bags down their shirts, some beside their bras, others just above their belt lines.

And no cheating, Ana said. Right beside your skin, where it’s warmest, otherwise it won’t work.

For the rest of the afternoon, until the rain passed and they’d rolled up the nets and climbed back into the warm van, the birds stayed nestled beneath her undershirt, thumping against her breastbone. She could still feel the flutter on her chest, like an extra heartbeat. She’d been feeding the sparrows in the lab ever since. Her own mash of grass seeds, grubs, and corn.

The male in her hand tried to fly again, then nibbled at the quick of her thumb.

Shhhh, she whispered and gently blew in his face. Stop that.

She reached into the cage and removed the bottom paper—typewriter correction paper—and set the bird back inside, and closed the door. The page was flecked with feces; Ana looked at the imprints left on the paper. Tiny forked scratches, sparrow’s feet, they indicated the direction the bird had tried to fly the night before. She held the correction paper briefly beneath the light. The orientation was remarkably consistent. The tiny feet made a spray pattern uniformly toward the southwest. She put the page on her desk to input later.