The bird was olive-green and yellowish with a chunky neb. No one knew where she came from. But she probably wasn't supposed to exist here. She just appeared 1 day, tattered and listless. She must have been flight quite some time earlier she found the states.

On our steel isle, songbirds didn't drop from the sky every day. For weeks the R/Five Atlantis had been stationed on the open sea some 40 miles from shore. Erik Cordes, an ecologist at Temple University, was leading a team of scientists from about half a dozen labs on a mission to explore life along the continental margin in the Pacific Ocean.

There, simply west of Costa rica and hundreds to thousands of feet below the water'south surface, underwater mountains are liquid rainforests. In nearby areas, Globe's chaff has cracked open, and methyl hydride and other gasses seep out in the pressurized depths. These seeps are oases for life in the bounding main's sunless, plant-less deep—an environment deadly to many other familiar life forms. Some of these deep inhabitants fuel themselves by eating microbes that transform methane and hydrogen sulfide into energy. Others get sustenance through symbiotic relationships with those microbes, which live in or on their bodies.

Little is known, however, about how these communities truly survive, or just how much their lives mean to ecosystems in the surrounding deep body of water, toward the surface, or even upward on country. This squad was at that place to find out. They too hoped to develop support to protect these seamounts and unique deep-sea habitats. The remoteness of these places was no longer plenty to shelter them from threats similar mining, fishing, and climate change.

Fifty-fifty as scientists aboard the ship hauled up alien creatures from the deep sea, our avian visitor was a unique and mysterious sighting. Anybody welcomed her aboard with homesick hospitality, putting her upwards in a paper-thin cottage high on a shelf with ocean views. Earlier long, she was eating blueberries, and nibbling on watermelon rinds and clementine wedges. Cannibalistic as it may or may non have been, she acquired an analogousness for scrambled eggs.

The nutrient and company lifted her spirits, and she began exploring the deck. Her favorite jaunt became a table and chairs just outside the vessel's chief laboratory door. She was the talk of the ship as she hopped about. Pace onto the deck at nearly any fourth dimension of 24-hour interval, and you'd likely find the chubby gal surrounded by human admirers, basking in the bounty of her newfound oasis.

As seen from the top deck of the R/V Atlantis, a deep-submergence vehicle called the Alvin is recovered after eight hours of deep-sea exploration with one pilot and two scientists onboard. Shana Goffredi

Shana Goffredi, a biologist and biochemist at Occidental College who specialized in deep sea symbionts, became a sort of godmother to the bird. Besides hooking her on eggs, Goffredi hooked the residuum of u.s. on a nickname for this visitor from land. Nosotros started calling her Homeslice.

During that prowl, these researchers studied hundreds of creatures, many new species, some unknown to science. These organisms hailed from depths so cold, dark, and weird that their existence was once thought impossible. But that fragmentary bird bugged me. Who was Homeslice, and why was she at that place?

I'd been obsessed with the deep sea since the previous year, when I learned about the work of William Beebe, an early 20th century naturalist, writer, and explorer. He was one of the first humans always to dive into this completeness and witness its otherworldly inhabitants. I joined Cordes' squad on the second leg of his mission's journey in October 2018, equally a science communicator to inquiry a book proposal.

I had never spent more than a few hours at sea. And those two-and-a-half weeks of ship life were unlike from annihilation I had experienced. There'due south a reason we apply the expression, "runs a tight ship." Anybody does their jobs and follows a strict schedule.

The R/5 Atlantis was no exception, even with all the unpredictable discoveries. More than a few times while aboard, I heard variations of a common theme: Every day is Monday. Without some kind of framework to shape routine, incertitude sprawls into chaos.

Each solar day revolved effectually the highly-orchestrated 8 AM launch and 5 PM landing of the DSV Alvin, the ship's human-occupied submersible that explored the deep sea. Simply the days were far longer, and scientists often worked through the night. I followed along, recording everything. I went to bed exhausted and woke up from body of water-built-in fever dreams.

Laetmonice wyvillei, a species of marine worm that lives in the deep ocean, is examined in the main lab of the ship. JoAnna Klein

The wheel continued. Time warped like waves in the Pacific. Information technology rose, crested, fell, crashed, and stretched smooth like mirrored glass. A minute could swell to months. Months could cinch to seconds. Ship fourth dimension, local time and three or more zones of home fourth dimension: I couldn't go on up. Fourth dimension became an antiquity of land life.

Well-nigh 50 people shared quarters on this 274-human foot-long vessel. Nosotros slept on bunks in small cabins and shared bathrooms and all other facilities. Nosotros ate meals together in the mess hall. On a lucky day, I could sneak some solitary time in the humid, windowless workout room or hide out in a six-foot-wide slither of space between 2 metal shipping containers.

In these cramped quarters, each of us was cut off from personal relationships and routines. We were allotted 150 MB of data daily and shared a crawling internet speed. "Yous can Google it when yous become off" was role of anybody'southward vocabulary. No matter a person'due south joy in beingness at sea, normal stresses heightened in this atmosphere. Equally an Alvin airplane pilot explained to me: You immediately experience trapped, and you "get squirrely toward the end." A hobby, a book, something unrelated to the ocean: That was how not to lose it.

Homeslice helped, and we humans developed a partnership with her. We gave her food, attention and shelter. She provided a land-born distraction and an open up space for our thoughts and conversations to wander. Homeslice was also a ham.

Shortly after she'd arrived, a BBC film coiffure visited the ship to motion-picture show the Alvin. On Saturday, Alvin checked out an unexplored underwater mountain. On Dominicus it surveyed an extinct volcano virtually a mile beneath the bounding main'southward surface. Unremarkably, but researchers awaited the vessel's return. But on these days, most the whole ship came to watch.

Homeslice stole the show, performing for her largest audience yet as the film crew followed along. She roosted in Goffredi'south hair, perched on another researcher's shoulder. When Alvin wheeled into the hangar, Homeslice flew to its handbasket, hopping from one container of sea life to the next. She perched high on a ledge and peered down. Peradventure Homeslice was as curious as we were about the mysteries the containers held.

1000offredi used her 150 MB to email with a friend, an proficient on equatorial birds. We learned that Homeslice was a female or young male migratory songbird that ate insects and fruits and had likely gotten lost on its migration.

Recently, I inquired more well-nigh Homeslice's identity. I spoke with Kenn Kaufman, a naturalist and editor of the Kaufman Field Guides, as well every bit a field editor for Audubon magazine. Judging past the bird'due south size and feather in my photos, he confirmed that Homeslice was a female Scarlet Tanager, a common and widespread migratory species. Scarlet Tanagers summer in the deciduous forests of eastern North America. They wintertime in Due south America, only e of the Andes, along the western edge of the Amazon basin.

Information technology wouldn't have been unusual to find a Ruddy Tanager at the same latitude every bit our vessel in late October, but Homeslice was a piddling as well far west from its typical route, and "a little flake lost," Kaufman said. "Being out there wouldn't really be on its way to any place information technology wanted to be."

Sometimes state birds show upward on ships, and they can get in that location two ways. Some are "doomed by their own instincts," said Kaufman, born with faulty navigational systems. Others are unwilling passengers of the wind. Because Homeslice was merely slightly out of range, she probable belonged to the latter category. She may have been flying along her normal southern route when a air current carried her out over the Pacific. She was probably tired, trying to brand her way back, when she spotted the ship and landed for a rest.

At starting time, she would have been a bit disoriented. "Hither information technology is, later this about-death experience," Kaufman explained, "and here, these large creatures are offering it food. It wouldn't accept long for the bird to adapt to that," especially if Homeslice were young.

It was difficult to pinpoint her age. Females and juvenile Cherry-red Tanagers are both olive and xanthous, with subtle differences in tail feather shape and coloring. Developed males, notwithstanding, supercede this duller plumage with vivid cherry-red and blackness for summertime breeding.

Getting to encounter a Crimson Tanager is often a treat, said Kaufman, even for experienced birders. Despite the male's flashy resort vesture, Scarlet Tanagers live rather cryptic lives in their summertime homes. They spend most time perched high in the canopies, raising their immature toward the center of large swaths of woods. They avoid forest edges, where parasitic Brown-headed Cowbirds can pull a fast one on tanager parents into raising their cowbird young.

To the uninitiated, tanagers are often "spark birds"—sightings that transform coincidental nature lovers into gorging birders. Most people, withal, only notice males in their summer plume, Kaufman said: "The winter birds, and the females, and the younger birds in their olive tones are often overlooked."

That is, unless one of these olive-toned birds is the just solitary songbird at sea.

Homeslice was not my spark bird, simply Beebe was kind of a spark man. As head of the so-New York Zoological Society's Department of Tropical Research, he recruited artists, writers and historians on his expeditions. His writings transformed me into a deep-ocean geek. In 1928, Beebe ready a field station in Nonsuch, Bermuda, in buildings in one case used to quarantine Yellowish Fever patients. There he explored the body of water's depths, folded similar a pretzel inside the Bathysphere, a 2,000-pound steel orb connected to a transport by a cable. On August xv, 1934, Beebe and its designer, Otis Barton, gear up a earth record at the time for the deepest dive, lowering themselves three,028 feet into the ocean. The descent was broadcast on BBC radio.

Long before the bathysphere, nevertheless, Beebe was a celebrated ornithologist. He published scores of essays, popular books and scientific papers, including an early study on the changing colors of the male person Reddish Tanager. Beebe fifty-fifty discussed the issue of lost country birds finding vessels at sea. In his 1906 "The Log of the Sun, a Chronicle of Nature's Twelvemonth," Beebe wrote: "Overcome with fatigue, they perch for hours in the rigging before taking flying in the direction of the nearest land, or, desperate from hunger, they wing fearlessly downwards to the deck, where food and water are seldom refused them."

He went on to write that "small events like these are welcome breaks in the monotony of a long ocean voyage, but are shortly forgotten at the end of the trip."

Homeslice disappeared the day after we identified her, subsequently most five days aboard the ship. We discussed her whereabouts. She had gone "to a farm upstate." She was macerated in a powerful engine fan where an engineer had found "a little piece of yellow bird." Perhaps Homeslice left with the BBC crew. It was possible that with regained strength, she reoriented and headed for Due south America. I wonder now if Homeslice was Beebe stopping past for another glance at the deep.

The small boat is lowered over the side of the research vessel to aid in recovery of the human-occupied vehicle Alvin and transfer crew and scientists from shore. Shana Goffredi

In the last year, I take often thought of Homeslice. As the pandemic began last spring, my New York Urban center apartment became its own island. I lived and worked, crammed into a tight space, isolated from friends, family, and the life I had known. For the first fourth dimension in a decade of living in the urban center, I heard chirping birds and windswept leaves instead of car horns and engines.

Those days stretched to months. Fourth dimension twisted, again. And as everyone around me worked to empathise what we didn't know, the unpredictable became anticipated. Modest stresses and exhaustion ballooned every bit Mon followed Mon.

These days, picturing life before or afterward COVID-19 has often felt impossible. As of today, a novel virus has killed nearly iii million people and infected more than 100 million others. Much of the earth remains in isolation, waiting similar suspension feeders, arms out, for vaccines. They're coming. In the concurrently, there is Homeslice.

Homeslice may have been a common bird, though 1 hard to spot in a familiar world. Out of place, she was hard to miss. She has reminded me that all of u.s.a. can find ourselves lost. Winds don't only carry songbirds to sea.

And here, floating atop this undulating unknown, Homeslice reminds me I am all the same on Earth. There is air and h2o, low-cal and dark, and there is life in all forms, including restless humans, migrating birds, and thesymbiotic marsh gas-fueled fan worms discovered on our trip . Including even the sort-of-living viruses that plague us. We travel the wind, walk on land, float in currents, or remain anchored in sediment. We're all surviving on this spinning island in the cosmos. And there's more than than one way to survive, even at the bottom of a body of water of Mondays.

Beebe was a visionary about a lot of things, only he was wrong nigh at least one: Nosotros do remember lost birds after the journey ends.