The Birds

I may be the only sentient human being in the country who enjoys driving across North Dakota in November, but there you are. And there they were, a flock of blackbirds paralleling the interstate that extended as far back and as far forward as I could see. I stared in awe at what must have been tens of thousands of the little blackbirds, stretching ahead of my truck in a ragged, undulating line until they blinked out on the horizon. Belatedly, it occurred to me to check my mileage, and when I guesstimated the distance I’d been watching them, my thumbnail estimate of the flock’s size was four to five miles in length. 

I’ve loved birds all my life. That includes hunting them – my trip across North Dakota was following a grouse-hunting trip to Wisconsin – but just as often, I simply love watching them, or caring for the flock of pigeons I keep or marveling at the fall and spring migrations of their distant cousins.  A hummingbird, a creature the size of my finger, may migrate thousands of miles south every year. Certain species of geese may fly a quarter of the way around the globe and fly hundreds of miles in a single night. 

When I was a child, I dreamed I could fly. I still remember those dreams, and the intoxicating freedom I felt as I soared suspended above the earth, en route to places I had not yet seen. Most of the birds that migrate each year are doing it for the first time, to places they too have never been. But where they go doesn’t really matter. That they’re still going is everything.