The plain pigeon was once so numerous in Puerto Rico that its flocks blotted out the sun. Spanish colonists wrote about the sky going dark with them. That abundance was real, documented, enormous. You know what it is to carry a largeness inside you that the world has mostly stopped registering.

Patagioenas inornata moves through dense forest canopy, selecting fruits and seeds with quiet precision, rarely breaking cover. It does not announce its foraging routes. It knows the forest floor by the light that filters through, and it builds its knowledge of a place slowly, from the inside out. You work the same way. You absorb a situation across many passes before you act, and by the time you do act, you have already mapped three layers most people never noticed. The precision others see as sudden has been accumulating since you walked in the door.

The plain pigeon is a seed disperser. It carries the genetics of fruiting trees across distances the trees cannot travel themselves. Forests with fewer plain pigeons regenerate more slowly, with less variety, in smaller patches. When you withdraw, the people around you lose the connective tissue they did not know you were providing. Your presence moves things forward in ways that only become visible once you are gone. You are, functionally, how certain things get planted.