Black-crowned night heron

The Black-crowned night heron gives North Brother Island its long interval of nonhuman occupation before people return. For more than twenty years the birds rule the island after its patients and veterans are gone; when they leave in the early twenty-first century, their unexplained departure seems insignificant until Apollo Kagwa discovers that the island has been reclaimed by women and children.

Island and Colony

By 1981, the smallpox patients had long since left North Brother Island, the war veterans had been evacuated, and drug addicts were no longer treated there. The island became known chiefly as a nesting colony for the Black-crowned night heron. The birds are described as small and unassuming, spending hours clicking at one another before breaking into asthmatic squawks. Their presence makes the abandoned island seem less empty: for over twenty years, they are its most conspicuous inhabitants.

Departure and Displacement

In the early part of the twenty-first century, the herons abandon the island. The reason remains unknown, and their disappearance attracts little notice beyond the curiosity of birders; it is not treated as a newsworthy event. The narration later supplies the missing explanation through Apollo Kagwa's arrival: that night he discovers that the birds have been displaced because women and children have returned to North Brother Island. Their departure is thus not explained as a change in bird behavior, but as the consequence of human occupation.

Narrative Significance

The colony's disappearance marks a change in who inhabits the island. The herons had occupied it through the long period after its institutional uses ended; their removal precedes Apollo Kagwa's discovery of a human community there. The contrast between an obscure birding curiosity and the consequential return of women and children also gives the revelation its scale: the island's apparent vacancy was neither permanent nor simply a matter of abandoned buildings. The birds register that change without being given a human explanation for their own departure.