A bird for every branch
For the last two nights I have been on the pike driving home at just about the 5:40 mark when I hit the 495 exit. Both nights the sun has made the sky a riot of pink and peach hues.
Both nights there has been a mighty flock of starlings perched in the trees and in the marshy land that no one can build on, completely careless to the whizzing danger of the on and off ramps and the concrete spirals of some highway engineer's vision of traffic control.
There are so many birds that it makes the skeleton trees of winter look as if they are in leaf; a bird for every branch. Each night just as my car has started the curling ascent of the off ramp, the starlings come to the conclusion that it is time to change to a different set of trees.
Each bird makes a stark black spot against the fading light as they lift themselves into the sky, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of starlings. Sometimes they move in an endless stream, a river of birds, lifting off from this branch and that branch in some pre-defined order I can not follow. Sometimes a great movement will seize a section of the flock and an entire tree of them will lift and move to the other side of the road, briefly darkening the sky.
Both nights I have felt a terrible joy watching their flight, the effortless weight of their presence in the space between the earth and the sky. Somehow witnessing a great mass of animals that are not humans makes me feel less isolated in the world.
I hope they are back for my commute tonight.
Both nights there has been a mighty flock of starlings perched in the trees and in the marshy land that no one can build on, completely careless to the whizzing danger of the on and off ramps and the concrete spirals of some highway engineer's vision of traffic control.
There are so many birds that it makes the skeleton trees of winter look as if they are in leaf; a bird for every branch. Each night just as my car has started the curling ascent of the off ramp, the starlings come to the conclusion that it is time to change to a different set of trees.
Each bird makes a stark black spot against the fading light as they lift themselves into the sky, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of starlings. Sometimes they move in an endless stream, a river of birds, lifting off from this branch and that branch in some pre-defined order I can not follow. Sometimes a great movement will seize a section of the flock and an entire tree of them will lift and move to the other side of the road, briefly darkening the sky.
Both nights I have felt a terrible joy watching their flight, the effortless weight of their presence in the space between the earth and the sky. Somehow witnessing a great mass of animals that are not humans makes me feel less isolated in the world.
I hope they are back for my commute tonight.