"The African Fish Eagle (Haliaeetus vocifer) is named for its call. Vocifer: Latin, meaning the one who carries a voice, or the loud one. It is the national bird of Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Sudan, Malawi, and Namibia. The author's previous field entries on the species, across this volume and the preceding one, consist entirely of margin notations reading: 'fish eagle call, present.' He has been in Africa for three volumes and has not written a dedicated entry. He is writing one now. He notes that the call he has been hearing as a solo territorial declaration is a duet. The female has been there the whole time."
He counted the margin notations on the third morning.
Thirty-seven. Thirty-seven times across two volumes he had written fish eagle, call present in the margins of other animals' entries — in the margins of the hippo entry and the crocodile entry and the wild dog entry and the secretary bird entry and a dozen others — and had not once opened a page and written the bird's name at the top and begun.
He had thought he knew what it was. He had known the call since his first season here. The call was Africa. Everyone knew the call. The call required no further investigation because the call was the category.
He opened a page.
He wrote African Fish Eagle at the top.
He looked at the water.
The pair was in the dead leadwood at the river's bend — the same tree, as he would later establish from Cetshwayo, that they had occupied for eleven years. Both birds. The male slightly smaller, the head whiter, the posture distinct. The female larger, settled, watching the water with the specific quality of attention the Colonel had learned to recognise as a hunting state.
The male called.
The head went back — that posture the Colonel had seen in every documentary about the continent, the bill open, the white throat working. The call went out across the water.
The female called.
The Colonel's pencil stopped.
He had been hearing one bird. There were two birds. The call he had been filing as present for thirty-seven margin entries was a duet — the male's portion overlapping with the female's slightly higher register, the two voices braided in the specific way of things that have been doing this together for eleven years and know each other's timing.
"The author," he wrote, "has been hearing the male's portion of a duet for two volumes and filing it as a complete sentence. It is not a complete sentence. The female's part has been there the whole time. The author notes that this observation applies more broadly but will not expand on it here."
He watched the female hunt at mid-morning.