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.
OMG even the blackbirds have been corrupted by twitter – does Scobie know of this – next thing you know we’ll see them on Facerbook
That birds condense, I salute. That startling replaces chirps though is still up in the air. As for upright dung?
Oh – wonderful! I have been thinking about writing about these birds as they come and go outside my window in the Fairmount woods! And here you are … telling the story so beautifully. Hurrah!
Without a good explanation but condensing my heart, I spent the night searching for the link, a pundit incising that blogs will always stack and stack but our stories will redeem us, the most precious thing, the gift no one can bring but us, that view that afternoon when lifting over the ridge, when curved around that building on that busy sidewalk, when nuzzled along that shoulder that keeps her smile, when all this breath collects what we wish and what we give away. Asking why, it must be for justice and knowing its grip, and it must be for beauty.
I like your writing, Brian. I’m glad to think that in the case of this comment thread you’ve been inspired a little by my own.