In early April the birds begin to filter aloft. At first a trickle, then a river. On a big night, two million birds fly over Grafton County, New Hampshire, where I live. I lie awake after midnight picturing them overhead, wings working, eyeing one another, twittering, a vast fortuitous flock.
There are sparrows and warblers, waterfowl and hawks, thrushes and flycatchers and wrens and thrashers. Male Robins sweep through early, kicking up turf to fuel their flight to Newfoundland. Soon little brown birds sprinkle the lawn, white-crowned, white-throated, streaked and chirping. A pair of American Bluebirds examines our nesting boxes before a House Wren claims them both, comically possessive. Small dramas.
On cold nights with snow or rain or wind, or nights with all of the above, they hunker down instead, sheltering in place until it’s safe again to take wing. For days they may stay put, but soon they must press onward, because territories await, mating awaits, ahead and not behind. On nights when the the weather along the flyway is clear and fine, the river of birds swells to 300,000 or 500,000 in flight at once, traveling 25 miles per hour or more, rising and falling from 1,000 to 3,000 feet to skirt the clouds and get their eyes on stars.
It’s a seasonal river, dry by late June, when all the birds have reached their summering grounds, set up shop and started shouting. They stake their claim and stuff their bills with sticks and grass and fluff and moss, weaving them into temporary mangers for the fragile eggs they will soon lay.
