When I lived in Ohio, my husband surprised me one evening with a nighthawk he’d found in three inches of water at the bottom of a 55-gallon drum at work.

He said, “I think we should call him Otto.”

We fed the bird cat food, those tuna-sized cans. If Otto was hungry, get out of the way! He would peck your toes if you were barefoot until you got the food from the frig, dipped in your fingertip, and offered it.

Nighthawks belong to the Goatsucker family (so wonderful). They are not perching birds, but nest on the ground. When Otto walked around on our linoleum, you could hear his little flat feet: splat splat splat.

It was September.  I worried that if Otto did not fly to Florida, he would be mine forever. I’d taken him flying before, in hopes that he would ‘split’, but he always ended up at my feet, peeping to be picked up.

One day I took him out to the field where we flew. I left him there. “Goodbye, Otto! Have fun in Florida,” I thought, as I backed onto the leaf-littered roadway.

When my husband got home that night he asked, “Where’s Otto?” so I told him what I’d done. He said, “Oh, honey. You can’t do that. He won’t know what to do. He’ll be there waiting, in exactly the same place you left him.”

“Oh, no!”

We got back there at sunset. There sat Otto, waiting for me, peeping for cat food. We took him home. The next day we took him to the Jefferson County Bird Man.

The guy had his garage set up for population studies of song birds. On shelves near the ceiling were nests and egg samples of every perching bird in the county. He knew their numbers as well as their secrets.

He kept Otto.

A week later, we went back. The Bird Man told us that Otto had been gone two days, but he’d returned for come cat food on the third day. The next morning he was gone for good.  I hear him still, calling out to me in the evening, a shadow against the sunset sky.