BLACKBIRDS

Day after Thanksgiving, feeling a bit nuanced, a bit nostalgic, feeling peaceful, not a trace of contention. It’s kind of nice. I’ve been at odds with mankind in general for decades. At first I thought I had a mild case of Misanthropy (Hatred of Humans) but it’s not that. Think of misanthropy as a full blown case of pneumonia and I would be a simple sneeze. But I am terribly disappointed with Homo sapiens as a species. We have the capacity for incredibly high minded cooperation and pursuit of a greater good but we resort to selfish, narrow, self serving hypocrisy when it suits us. We all do it; human nature. Maybe that’s why I love nature and wild things: no pretense.

Murmuration: by definition it is a large, really large, flock of blackbirds that assemble in the fall and through winter. They go unnoticed while on the ground but perched on power lines you can’t miss them: in the air it’s mesmerizing. In the air obviously, they have a leader and thousands if not tens of thousands blackbirds follow in close formation, so dense you can hardly see though it. In dense clouds, stretching out into long bands, dipping, climbing, changing direction, swooping; it looks like some kind of digital, special effects. Experts agree they gain safety in numbers with this behavior and unmatched efficiency finding food. But when you see one it’s magical and that’s hard to beat. 

It was cloudy-gray, trying to rain on my way to the gym this morning. Pulling in I noticed, nobody there, parking lot was empty. They are taking the full holiday and I’m glad that they are but I miss my workout. The loop through the parking lot put me back at the entrance, looking out across an open field. From the left, across a backdrop of early morning gray I saw a few blackbirds, then a few more. Then it was blackbirds by the thousands, dipping, weaving, up and down, down and up, expanding, contracting, reversing course, coming back across my line of sight; my first murmuration of the season. I caught myself holding my breath, grinning like the 11-year old trapped inside my head. After several reversals, multiple passes, left to right and right to left, they descended upon the field. Many went for the power lines across the road. Like NASCAR drivers racing down pit row, blackbirds were speed parking just meters away. Within a few seconds, all three high voltage wires were shoulder to shoulder with perched starlings,( Sturnus vulgaris), not to be confused with (Quiscalus quiscula), common grackles, a sleeker, more attractive blackbird that practices the same behavior. As far as I could see in both directions they perched there as if they were watching me. With nobody behind me, streets empty, I sat there as if I had just been party to a miracle. 

My most memorable murmuration was several years back, in Dayton, Ohio. We visited a small church with stain glass windows. As the minister preached her sermon a sizable murmuration swooped low, up and over the building, their shadows blurring the windows and the compression from thousands of wing beats registered in the ears and on the chest. The distraction subsided but the birds turned, came back from the other direction. Again and again, they buzzed the church. The preacher had a dilemma, keep preaching or acknowledge nature. She stayed with her text and lost her audience; everyone was watching the windows and each other. Just when it felt like they had moved on, they made another pass. It went on for a long time. I don’t remember anything about the minister or her sermon but the murmuration is forever archived inside my head. 

Starlings are nuisance birds, vectors for disease and unacceptably aggressive with other birds at the feeder. Grackles are only slightly less offensive but in the murmuration, they make up for a bad reputation. If reincarnation is the norm after all, I hope to come back as a humming bird or a tern. But as easily as I denigrate my own kind I would probably slip in with the grackles and starlings for some tightly choreographed, close formation, murmuration-aerobatics. Birds don’t have morals or egos, no ideologies or world views. They don’t have anything to gain or lose with Making America Great Again, like we were greater when we practiced genocide on Native Americans or pillaged Viet Nam rather than appear weak to our allies. The other human paradigm is that, Make America Great Again really means, Make America White again. Even if you can’t keep people of color from gaining majority status, you can gerrymander voting districts to favor white candidates and suppress minority access to the polls. Birds don’t know, don’t care. People do the damnedest things. I’ve oversimplified to a fault. But that’s what we do. I don’t really want to be a bird, just able to fly like one. Being able to know where I came from and that I will die someday, they cancel each other out. But knowing our ultimate destination, I want squeeze all of the juice out of the time that we have and I like that. I can do math, write songs and make furniture out of dead trees and I wouldn’t want to give that up either. But I’m starting to sound preachy and neither do I want to do that. It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I’m still feeling good about my human being nature.