in the future, and one finch had a beak depth of 112 millimeters, which would have made it roughly the size of a pelican. I flagged them all in yellow, and wrote a note at the top of the spreadsheet explaining each one, politely, and the next night, when they called, Oskar held up his bandaged thumb to the camera and said, "The pelican finch was me. I am sorry. It was one point twelve centimeters. I was in pain."
"It's okay," I said. "I fixed it."
"She fixed it," Oskar announced to the room, and somewhere behind him, ten sunburned people cheered, and I sat in my kitchen in Danbury and turned red to the ears.
My mother stood at the counter behind me through the whole call, every night that first week, pretending to wash the same three dishes. On the fourth night, Oskar did what Dr. Brindle had promised, and pointed the camera down at a pair of Nazca boobies on a black lava ledge, and then swung it over to a blue-footed booby a little way off, alone, doing his courtship dance, lifting one ridiculous turquoise foot and then the other, slowly, deliberately, as if he were stepping over something invisible, and then spreading his wings and pointing his beak straight at the sky and whistling.
I heard a plate go into the sink behind me, hard. I turned around.
My mother had both hands over her mouth. She was looking at the screen over my shoulder, at the booby with his feet, and she wasn't crying exactly. It was something older than crying. It was the face of a fifteen-year-old girl in a school uniform on the deck of a boat, laughing, with the sea behind her.
"Who is that," I said to her, softly, in Spanish. "Who's talking?"
"Piquero de patas azules," she said. Her voice cracked on the azules. "Sula nebouxii. The males with the bluest feet, the females like them best. Because the blue comes from what they eat. It means he's a good fisherman. It means he can feed a family."
"Come sit," I said, and pulled out the chair next to me, the one with the wobbly leg, which my father had finally fixed on Sunday night with wood glue and two new screws and without saying a word to anyone. She sat. Dr. Brindle, in her straw hat, leaned into the camera, and I said, "This is my mom. She taught biology for six years in Cuenca. She's been to Puerto Ayora."
"Mrs. Quizhpe," said Dr. Brindle. "Then you can tell us what we're doing wrong."
And my mother, who had a face that did not do anything it did not decide to do, laughed out loud, the way she must have laughed on that boat, and leaned forward toward the screen, and began, in careful English and then in faster Spanish when Joaquín turned out to understand it, to tell eleven strangers on an island in the Pacific about the year 1995.