In the late spring of 2020, I returned to my family home in the North Bay, driving through the night, my Subaru rocking in the highway wind. It was the height of the pandemic. When I finally reached home, my mother and I went out for daily walks on the roads branching out from our hometown: Henno Road, Nun’s Canyon, Adobe Canyon. Acorn Woodpeckers drummed above us in the roadside oaks. At the same time, Dick Evans was walking the public lands of San Francisco, eyes open to the patterns birds were weaving.

Mine had been a reluctant homecoming. I was supposed to go to Alaska that season, guiding wilderness trips as I had done every summer for a decade. I missed Alaska’s ankle-deep carpet of moss, wolf tracks pressed into soil under towering spruce trees, the summer songs of forest birds. Then, one day in this difficult time, as I sat under a tree on the Bear Valley Trail at Point Reyes National Seashore, I heard a familiar Alaskan sound: the clear trill of a Varied Thrush, like a referee’s whistle blown on some unseen playing field in the woods. As I lingered, another familiar song washed over me: the complex, cascading notes of a Pacific Wren, as bubbling and full of movement as running water. If I closed my eyes, I could have been 2,000 miles north in Alaska’s temperate rainforest.

Walking the coast later that afternoon, I watched long skeins of Brown Pelicans moving south along the shore like fat pterodactyls. All through my twenties, working in the winters on a small boat in the Sea of Cortez, I had witnessed this same population arrive to breed and fish alongside bottlenose dolphins and blue whales. My homeplace, I began to realize, was a global crossroads. I unclenched my jaw. I had found myself-inadvertently, obdurately-at the center of something extraordinary. Time and again, the birds continue to shake me awake to the rare beauty of the Bay. As Dick’s photos put in plain sight, no place is wilder than our own backyard. No place feels more precarious, either.

Artist and birder Jenny Odell writes, “Our citizenship in a bioregion means not only familiarity with the local ecology, but a commitment to stewarding it together.” To be a true citizen in this state of change, I know that I will be called not only to love this place and its dwellers-mother, husband, neighbors, Wrentits, and raptors alike-but to care for it too. When the first Varied Thrushes return in the autumn to fill the coastal forest with song; when the last cranes of spring rise from the shallow delta waters and, with voices like rattling bones, ascend-how will I show up for them?