It’s the time of year when thousands of blackbirds condense. Suddenly the air is filled with thick clouds of them wheeling in startlingly precise formations. They fill the windbreak and the woodlot. They chatter comfortably with each other. To me it’s a cacophonous high volume treble of twitters and tweets, jabbers and chirps, as they strip the remaining hackberries from the trees and vocally share their common presence. Then something will startle them and the chirping ends, replaced by a windstorm of wings as the whole flock takes flight. Sometimes they end up in a cornfield down the road, sometimes in a tree line across the marsh. It’s not always obvious why they come or why they go, but come and go they do, these huge flocks of birds, all of one mind, avoiding mid-air collisions with no air traffic controllers to mark their flight paths. They wheel into the air by the hundreds and thousands and off they go, leaving little to mark their passage besides purple berry colored bird dung and a bunch of black feathers stuck upright in the lawn.
Their passage is seasonal, unmarked by tech bloggers who are studying other migratory behaviors with as much hope of understanding them as I have of understanding the blackbirds. The flock in my trees is Yet Another Social Network.
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