I am a second-year biology student, so take this for what it is, which is one person noticing a thing and then not being able to stop noticing it.

I sit in the University square most mornings with my notes, under the phoenixes, the way half the University does. We all love them, for they are the first thing anyone shows a visitor. But a few weeks ago I was sketching one for a wildlife biology assignment, and I saw that it had a gray feather. Just the one, low on the wing, dull as ash against all that red and gold. I thought it was odd, until I started looking at the others.

They all have one, every phoenix I have checked in the square. Some have several, and I do not know how I never saw it before.

And here is the part I keep turning over. I have not been able to find a single young one. I asked the older students, and I asked the groundskeeper who has minded the square for longer than I have been alive, and he scratched his head and admitted he could not remember the last time he saw a baby phoenix in the square.

I want to be careful, because I am only a student, and this is a square full of birds that everyone adores, and I am not trying to worry anyone. But I checked my biology textbooks to see if there was mention of phoenix feathers greying, but there isn’t. Maybe the young ones and the brightly colored ones roost somewhere I have not thought to look. But a whole square of birds that each carry a little ash, and not one of them young, is the kind of pattern they teach us to worry about rather than explain away.

So I am asking in print for an answer no one I’ve met can explain: has anyone else noticed? I would like very much to be told I am seeing things.

Tamsin Reed is a second-year biology student at Vaelthir University. This piece was submitted to the Chronicle’s Vaelthir pages as a reader editorial.