In flight
The season of migration is upon us. Some of it we see right in front of our eyes and some of it goes unnoticed. I’ve been reading Helen Macdonald’s book Vesper Flights. She opens our eyes to the unseen flights of birds and other creatures. These are magical essays predominantly about nature. Macdonald is an expert writer on nature and you may have read her best-selling book — H is for Hawk.
Helen is also a poet. She shows us many aspects of nature which will move us beyond the boundaries of our present lives. In the essay called “High Rise,” we venture into the city of New York to climb the Empire State Building. There Helen meets Andrew Farnsworth who is a researcher at Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Twice a year high above the city there is the seasonal flight in the night of thousands of migrating birds. As a former NYer for many years, this astonishes me.
Picking up the story, high above New York City atop of the Empire State Building, Helen Macdonald writes:
“We stare out into the dark, willing life into view. Minutes pass. Farnsworth points. ‘There!’ he says. High above us is a suspicion of movement, right at the edge of vision where the sky dissolves in dusty chaos. I swing my binoculars up to my eyes. Three pale pairs of beating wings, flying north-north-east in close formation. Black-crowned night herons. I’ve only ever seen them hunched on branches or crouched low by lakes and ponds, and it’s astounding to see them wrenched so far from their familiar context. I wonder how high they are. ‘Those are pretty large,’ Farnsworth says. ‘When you look up into the light, everything looks bigger than it is, and closer than it is.’ He estimates that the herons are about three hundred feet above us, so they’re about one and a half thousand feet above ground level. We watch them vanish into darkness.” Helen Macdonald,Vesper Flights
Can you imagine this? These same birds –warblers, grosbeaks, songbirds, herons, swallows and others earlier flew from ponds and swamps in New Jersey making their journey to the top of the Empire State building and onward northward to migrate. Where they make their home involves two phenomena: nests and food.
I’m just back from a bike ride and I saw a blue heron standing at the edge of a lake and a beautiful white egret poised elegantly. I asked: “When will you make your journey north? Or will you stay in our milder winters?” I ponder about all birds and then my mind turns to people in flight. Doesn’t everyone have the same basic need and desire to find a place that will receive them, a place to build a life, a family, to work and satisfy the hopes of a “nest and food.” We share this with all animals and yet we struggle all over the world to make provisions for this basic need so dramatically played out in nature.
