One of our 2026 Monarch Award Nominees.
One consequence of leaving my bicycle outside year-round, aside from rust and spiderwebs, is that a bird built a nest in my bike basket. When the thunderstorms finally dissipated and early summer weather lured me outside for an afternoon bike ride, I discovered the nest of straw and string with two perfect, red-umber-speckled, marble-sized eggs. With the greatest of intentions, I undid the bungee cords, lifted the nest, and placed it on a lawn chair. Then I panicked—realizing that I might have disturbed the eggs and scared the mother away—perhaps she, fearing a predator, would abandon her babies. I uploaded a photo of the eggs to iNaturalist which suggested that the eggs belonged to a Carolina wren—a compact, ochre-brown bird with striking white eyebrows. Throughout the day, I watched the nest to see if the mother bird would return. No sight of her all evening, or the next morning. It turns out I had broken a law: it’s illegal to move the nest of a migratory breeding bird. Yet on the third day, I peered into the nest to find a miracle: a third egg had appeared! Mother bird must have returned in the night. I watched all day—no sign of her. Later that evening—I checked the nest to find a fourth egg, but still no sign of the bird. The following day, I followed my ritual of examining the nest as soon as I woke up, and suddenly the mother bird flew straight out of the basket into my face with a flurry of wings. I caught my breath and gave her time to return to the nest; a few hours passed, she returned, and she hasn’t budged for two full days. I’m now more wary when I examine the nest for eggs— I’ve learned to respect her boundaries and observe from a distance—but I can see her little beak barely protruding from the straw.
I have baby fever, but not the kind you think—yes, I am a woman in my mid-thirties, which makes me the perfect demographic for this affliction—but my obsession is with nonhuman animal babies, rather than wee humans. I seem to be a magnet for baby animals, or perhaps it’s my confirmation bias—I’m subconsciously on the lookout for young, cute animals, and I find them everywhere I look. All day I listen for the chirps of the young woodpeckers in the hole of a black locust tree outside my kitchen window. Today, on my walk to campus to teach a summer class on science and nature writing, I came upon a fawn—a veritable Bambi with pale polka-dots and spindly legs—she seemed lost and hadn’t yet found her fear of humans, so she wobbled right up to me, sniffed the air, and kept on her merry way. I was tempted to cancel my class to keep my eye on this wayward orphan, to see if she had lost her mother to a car, but instead I taught my class in a state of distraction and worry, peeking out the window every five minutes to watch the fawn’s promenade around campus. While walking my dog to the post office, I watched a mother squirrel carry her baby in her mouth while crossing the street and hopping up into a tree. While hunting for fossils in a streambed, I lifted a rock and found a tiny red eft, no bigger than my pinky finger. I was ecstatic. I drove out of my way to visit Clementine, the baby orangutan at the Columbus zoo, and to my surprise and delight, I also witnessed a baby gorilla and two baby macaques.
These newborns at the zoo led to a sudden bloom of primate representation in my personal media: I binged all the nature documentaries I could stream, starting with Chimp Empire, featuring a fresh-faced toddler chimpanzee, and my instagram algorithms display almost exclusively baby orangutan photos. My compulsive appetite for baby animal content reached its peak during a recent storm—tornado sirens be- gan blaring during a thunderstorm, and they didn’t stop for several hours; emergency alerts lit up on my phone; campus safety emails warning of the danger flooded my inbox; rain and wind battered against my thin windows. My faculty apartment doesn’t have a basement, so—following the national recommendations, I sheltered in place in the next best room—my closet. Tintin and I crawled into the dark space with pillows, a flashlight, a water bottle, a helmet (in case of falling trees and debris), and my laptop. I checked all the local news and watched the weather radar as the tornado approached my little town, then as my fear and need for comfort increased, I succumbed to my illness: I watched a wildlife documentary about baby animals. Imagine if the tornado had actually hit my apartment—the last thing images to have reached my brain would have been a beach full of newly-hatched turtles racing towards the ocean; three lion cubs hiding in a rock pile, a young elephant learning how to use his trunk, and a baby orangutan peeing on his mom in the treetops.
For all of my affection for these furry, aquatic, and feathered infants, I don’t have any interest in having a child of my own. I swear! To clarify—my partner has an eight-year-old daughter whom I love dearly, but I am steadfast in my decision to not produce a little animal from my own womb. I can’t imagine it; I’m an androgynous queer woman, and the concept of giving birth just doesn’t feel natural to me. I also don’t feel thrilled about adding to the exponential population of humans on this overburdened planet, and I am not financially, emotionally, mentally, or physically stable enough to raise a child of my own. I still feel like a kid—I have so much growing to do, and so little time! I can envision the disastrous hypothetical possibility of my giving birth; first I would succumb to postpartum depression, mourn the loss of my free time and compromised career, then overcompensate by hovering anxiously around my baby with my helicopter-parent rotor blades in overdrive. [Continued inside Vol.4]
FRANCES CANNON is a writer, editor, educator, and art- ist. She is the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College. She also edits for Green Writers Press, Onion River Press, and Maple Tree Press, and she recently served as the managing director of the Sundog Poetry Cen- ter in Vermont. Cannon has taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Champlain College, the Vermont Commons School, the University of Iowa, and Burlington City Arts. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA in poet- ry and printmaking from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Ben- jamin Reimagined (MIT Press, 2019), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press, 2017), Tropicalia (Vagabond Press, 2016), Uranian Fruit (Honeybee Press, 2016), Sagittaria (Bottlecap Press, 2022), Preda- tor/Play (Ethel Zine, 2020), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press, 2024), and Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga (forthcoming with Valiz, 2026).
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