The sky has faded from dusk blue to navy, a punch of cobalt where the sun has set. Smoky clouds are strewn across the sky, and we walk a gravel track under gnarled pōhutukawa, crunching through the dark. Turning a corner, I get a strong whiff through the understory of kawakawa. It’s unmistakable. It’s home.

It’s the smell of petrels.

Burrowing petrels and shearwaters have a particular odour. Some love it, some hate it, but to me the musty warm smell is the sweetest thing in the world. I’m instantly transported back into a slew of memories, nights on islands, birds circling overhead, calling, chuckling in burrows, plummeting through the canopy in a crash and a thrash and thudding to the ground next to me. Right back to the very start, the first night I spent on a seabird island, sitting in the forest, bewitched by the calling, calling, the rustle of leaves, and that warm smell. It smells of the sea and of the land, of warm burrows lined with dry leaves, of salt and feather-dander. There are ōi here. I know this as fact but haven’t experienced it yet, having not walked around Mauao this late at this time of year. It’s May, prebreeding time, when most birds will be around their colonies at night. I enjoy the confirmation that my nose brings me of their presence.

The sky darkens, and I walk on. A ridge above a bay, and the long winged cutout silhouette of a bird sails past. A shadow cut from the greying blue of the ocean. Another. Twisting, shifting in and out of sight, phasing visible to invisible as the background changes, lost against the dark bulk of forest. And a call that I know as well as my own skin, a deep croon capped with a squeak. A squeaky wheel. They’re returning. Stars shudder into view through the seamisted air. Ōi sail past like jet-fighters, like stunt-kites, their long wings eating the air. I call everyone to a stop and unleash a whoop of my own as they skim eye-level across the channel, weaving around the corner and into the trees. A bird calls in return, jackknifing at the end of the bay to disappear into the dark.

There is effervescence in my chest that has been missing. I want to whoop and call and feel their feathers brush my head as they soar past, but there’s a mass in my throat that no sound can escape past. Tears prick my eyes instead, and the stars overhead splinter in the dusk glow. I have been land-locked for over a month. Yesterday I walked straight into the ocean, unflinching through the tumbled breakers. I had a grin on my face as golden light flung itself across the isthmus, dying in the west. The sky was painted, clouds lit and glowing. I breathed in the salt and plunged into cooling autumn water, feeling the tug of the currents against my legs. This evening my birds are welcoming me home.

My claim on them is only that they introduced me to the life I have now. Ōi were the first birds I asked scientific questions of, my gateway into the world of seabird science. They were the first birds I studied in earnest, the first seabirds I encountered closer than a lens-length away. On that first night, what feels like forever ago, the first of them I held in my hands was a girl the same age as I was then, and I still marvel as their strength and longevity.

Their calls follow us as we walk the circuit back to the road, where the steady hum of traffic and the glowing port protect against the still darkening night. I stand, staring up at the black mountain bulk. I can hear them still, my ears seeking their call patterns over the noise of busses and cars. They are invisible, unheard to anyone who doesn’t know their calls. Down here, real life is warming up again, after a month locked away. Up there, the real world is following the same patterns it does every year, in the bruised blue night the ōi are circling and calling, circling and calling and courting above their colony. I’m wrenched by the need to be there with them, to sit silent in the night and hear them talk to each other in the dark. To watch black wings arch across the sky, plunge from stars to sand in the undergrowth, scrape out burrows with hooked beaks, shuffle and croon in the forest.

That is my world,  not this. Not the thrum of traffic, not the tungsten-LED-sodium glare that chases away the velvet darkness. So much has seemed unnecessary recently, and it is because I have been apart from matters most to me – the wildness of the world, the joy I find in its mysteries, the comfort in its seasonal patterns.

The knowledge that our concerns mean nothing to the birds.

I have missed the ocean, and it’s pull on me. I have missed the birds. I feel unbound, as I did when I walked in to the sea. My eyes feel open again, and see detail where things were becoming blurred.

I am made to be a part of the world, not apart from it. There is salt in my soul and feathers in my mind that take me out over the waves, into the night, the stars blazing above and the sea restive below, skimming waves, stretching out to brush the darkness with my wingtips.