🌕 Moon of Brown Leaves 2025

The eclipsed eclipse

Dear Lunatics,

Tonight, while 85% of the world’s population is enjoying one of the longest and most widely visible lunar eclipses in history, I’m looking out a rain-streaked window in New England, where the Moon has already dipped below the horizon. I’m staring up at a cloudy sky the color of a smothering pillow, binoculars hanging limply from my neck, and I’m truly not sure what to do with myself.

The binoculars, which I like to keep at hand every full moon, belong to my father, who uses them, on occasion, to discern whether the hawk perched on a winter branch in our backyard is a Cooper’s Hawk or a Sharp-shinned Hawk.

My dad used them last week while birding with a visiting relative from Ireland who, above all, was hoping to see a blue jay.

That seemed absurd to me—blue jays are as common as houseflies here. But if you’ve never seen a blue jay before, with its dyed blue mohawk and goth eye shadow, it would be quite a sight.

All birds are strange, if you think about it. Sometimes I imagine they’re exotic beings that fluttered out of a fantasy novel or migrated here from another dimension. If that were true, we’d never get enough of them. We’d all be birders.

I think the Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo would understand what I’m saying. In 1957, she painted Creation of the Birds, in which birds emerge from refracted moonlight.

Remedios Varo, The Creation of Birds (1957)

Speaking of birds, it’s a big night for the European nightjar. Every year, on this particular full moon, they gorge on moths and beetles and glowworms, using the near daylight conditions to fatten up on easy prey. In the morning, they sleep on the forest floor, relying on their speckled brown plumage to camouflage themselves among fallen leaves. And then, exactly ten nights from now, they set off, flying to southern Africa for the winter.

Their travel plans, as predictable as clockwork, are written by the moon.

I wonder if, given tonight’s lunar eclipse, they’ll be confounded.

I wonder if, this year, they’ll miss their flight.

European Nightjar (try not to step on it)

The male European nightjar is famous for its ten-minute song at nightfall, during which it hops around, swiveling its neck in all directions to create a ventriloquial effect so that its call sounds as though it is coming from all directions at once—an impressive mating performance for this not-quite-monogamous species.

During the pandemic, while others used their newfound free time to learn a language, I decided to learn birdsong. After a few weeks, I had to stop. Once birdsong became legible, it was no longer the pleasant ambient background noise of the outdoors. It was freaked out yellow orioles telling the chickadees a gang of grackles was in the vicinity. A walk through the woods became a walk through Times Square.

In his memoir Wonders All Around, Bruce McCandless III recalls being driven a thousand miles from through the night Houston to Florida by his father, who was determined to see the last Apollo mission blast off from Cape Canaveral. It must have been torture for the eleven-year-old Bruce, especially since his father played A Field Guide to Western Bird Songs on cassette the entire trip: “the caws and croaks of jays, herons, and gulls filled the Volvo long into the night.”

A steal on Ebay

Bruce’s father, whose name was, of course, Bruce McCandless II, was a bird lover. He once took in the orphaned fledglings of a poisoned owl, teaching them how to hunt by running a toy locomotive on a track through their enclosure with frozen mice in the coal car. He finally released them on a night in late August that he described, in his notes, as “full moon, no wind, very quiet, sort of misty.”

Watching Apollo 17 flare, the last moon mission, blast into the Florida night sky, Bruce’s father must have been filled with a mixture of awe and bone-deep sadness. As a longtime astronaut candidate, he was watching his chance of walking on the Moon fade into blackness.

Why hadn’t he been picked for an Apollo mission? The question must have haunted him for decades to come.

Some blamed his obsession with birds. During the survival trips the astronauts took in the 1960s, he would often go missing, straying from the group to follow a bird that had caught his interest. Eventually, the group had to appoint someone a “Bruce watcher.”

In a profile in The Washington Post, he was described as “an avid birdwatcher and past president of the Houston branch of the National Audubon Society.” The article also reported: “Other astronauts said that he seemed to be more interested in the fate of disappearing bird species than in the course of manned space flight.”

According to his son, however, his father’s personality was the more likely culprit:

“Another astronaut Dad worked with for years once theorized that so much of my father’s brain was dedicated to processing power that he had little left over for interpersonal relationships. This was her polite way of saying that though he was smart, Bruce McCandless could also be abrupt, self-absorbed, and prickly. In other words, he was hard to get along with.”

Bruce McCandless II (NASA)

For twenty years, Bruce McCandless II was earth-bound. At one point, he served as “bird control officer” at Kennedy Space Center and was tasked with keeping the geese, egrets, herons, and thousands of wintering swallows from gathering on the NASA landing strip, not to mention flying into and ravaging engines upon takeoff.

I wonder if it was the years of birdwatching that helped him develop the Manned Maneuvering Unit, a jet-powered backpack that could be worn over an astronaut’s spacesuit so that he could fly freely through space.

Once the device was functional, NASA decided that its inventor was the natural choice to try it out.

On February 7, 1984, Bruce McCandless II drifted from the Space Shuttle Challenger's cargo doors into the empty reaches of space. He wore no attachments. For over six hours, with his teeth chattering, he finally flew. He was the first human being to perform an untethered spacewalk. He called himself "the smallest spaceship in history.”

From Challenger’s cabin, the flight’s pilot, Hoot Gibson, took one of the most iconic photographs in history.

Astronaut Bruce McCandless II reaches his maximum distance from space shuttle Challenger before returning to the spacecraft (NASA)

Whenever he sees this photograph of his father, which is ubiquitous in advertising, his son thinks “that’s the guy who left the shuttle to fly off, untethered, into space? I used to beat him at Scrabble.”

For his part, the astronaut was grateful that the gold solar shield attached to his helmet obscured his face: “[I]t could be anybody in there. It's sort of a representation not of Bruce McCandless, but mankind."

The surrealist Remedios Varo would have understood.

“I do not wish to talk about myself,” she once said, “because I hold very deeply the belief that what is important is the work, not the person.”

Toward the end of his life, Bruce McCandless II resisted the wise-spread demand that he write an autobiography.

So after his death, it fell to his son to tell the father’s story.

It was not an easy task.

The memoir was published in 2021

In the final chapter of Wonders All Around, the son admits that despite his best efforts, his father’s inner life remained a mystery to him. His father’s true self is forever hidden behind that gleaming, reflective visor.

“It’s a common affliction, this curiosity, an ancient exercise, a yearning,” McCandless III writes. “In the shadowy essence of our fathers we hope we can find answers to the essential questions: Why did you put me here? And what am I supposed to do now?”

Fathers may be as common as blue jays, but do we ever really see them?

I wonder, if we ever go birding together, whether I will find myself training the binoculars not on a streak of colored wings among the leaves, but on my father, his face eclipsed by the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat.

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See you on the Harvest Moon!

—WD