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Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: “Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.” I had already developed a relationship with Steller’s jays before I knew their name, recognizing the blue breast and mohawk whenever one landed in the scrub oak in our backyard. I knew its call, a throaty screech that doesn’t match its physical beauty. And I could tell the difference between a Steller’s jay and a scrub jay, a close relative with feathers a lighter shade of blue and a soft gray belly. But naming it did give me a certain awareness of the bird, a new kind of connection. Now whenever I saw it I’d say its name.

Steller’s jay.

A few years later we were hiking that same trail with those same cousins. I was carrying a large, gauzy net with a long, wooden handle. There was a mason jar in my backpack with hardened paste at the bottom, soaked with nail-polish remover—my “kill jar.” I was the straggler that day, falling behind the rest of my family as we switchbacked up the side of a steep slope.