One of the things I’ve always liked about Bloomington is the way you can hear birds singing. No matter what part of town I’ve lived in, it seems like I’ve always been able to hear birds singing somewhere nearby. Maybe it’s like that everywhere; I don’t know. One snowy morning years ago I walked to work and noticed a bunch of birds gathered on a power line, chirping and twittering. I wondered what they were communicating to each other. When I got to work, I saw my co-workers gathered around the coffeepot, chattering to each other about the cold weather. Maybe that’s what the birds had on their minds too.
Lately I’ve been noticing big flocks of birds wheeling through the sky, making great swooping circles in the air. “I wonder why they do that,” I said to my friend Mark. “They do it because they can,” he replied. Fair enough; we humans do plenty of things because we can (think of the Olympics, or of mountain-climbers). Yesterday as I was walking downtown, I got to see a bird gathering up close: groups of birds overhead, and a couple of trees which were full of birds, maybe a couple of hundred of them silhouetted in the bare branches against the gray sky and chirping energetically. I stood for a moment admiring the dark clouds of airborne birds and the swirling beauty of their motions. I noticed that the trees behind me had fallen silent, and turned just in time to see every bird in them take wing in one concerted movement, joining the birds in the sky and flowing up the street like a river of birds. They passed directly overhead; I had never seen so many birds in one place before, and I was reminded of the huge clouds of passenger pigeons that darkened the sky, in the days before humans wiped them out.
I thought that was my avian encounter for the day, but after I had stopped at the union building in the central part of campus, I stepped outside into another gathering of birds. One group flew overhead and settled briefly in the trees directly ahead of me as I watched, transfixed. We were on the edge of Dunn Woods, a pretty wooded area surrounded by classroom and administrative buildings, and the air and the trees were full of birds. Again the birds in the trees fell silent and, cued by some signal that I couldn’t comprehend, took to the air with a great rushing sound. There were so many that I could hear the beating of their wings as they flew into the woods.
The clock in the tower was striking 2 and I hadn’t had my lunch yet, but I followed them into the woods. I stood for probably 20 minutes watching them. No matter how many birds were perched in the trees, there were always other birds flying over in steady streams or little eddies, a welter of birds landing and taking off. Several of the trees acted as bird magnets; I’d see a small black cloud detach itself from the flow, descend and land briefly and then take to the skies again. The cacophony of their conversation was incredible. A wave of new birds arrived, and then another. There were far more than I’d seen earlier. Another silence fell, and again the noise of a great wind arose as the birds all took flight. They flew a sweeping semi-circle over the treetops and then settled raucously a little further away, further into the woods. I started walking toward downtown again, slowly, pausing often to watch the birds. A minute or two later, they all took off one last time, filling the sky to the south. This time they went so far that I couldn’t hear them any more, and didn’t see the next place they landed. They left me gazing skyward and wondering what that was all about.
I don’t know what kind of birds they are, or why there are so many of them here. It’s possible that they are starlings, which were imported to this country from Europe sometime after the passenger pigeons were gone. From what I can gather, starlings have developed into something of a pest and a threat to native species. Whatever these birds were, though, I was moved to see this great gathering of creatures and their mysterious communication with each other and their equally mysterious patterns of movement. As intriguing as it is to speculate about possible life on other planets, there is plenty to occupy our minds in learning about the other life on this planet.
