The birds

I'm working from home today, and I just saw a marvel of nature.

I opened the front door to let Tex out. (No, of course, she didn't actually want to go out. She was just meowing at the door. And no, she's not the marvel of nature.) There was a flock of smallish, black birds down the driveway and across Ivy Terrace, making such a ruckus that I could hear them quite easily from our front door. Walking closer, I saw what had to be at least a thousand birds. Over a few minutes, most of them congregated on the ground in a backyard. That group of groundlings then flew 50 yards through some trees to some different open land. All the while, the birds had been chirping and chattering. Their calls stopped, all at once, as all of the birds took off from ground and trees. The sound of their wings was stunning: soft in quality, like a stack of frayed paper being ruffed, but loud in volume, because there were hundreds of stacks of paper, all around.

The flock redistributed themselves at the tops of trees around the Holler and resumed their calls. After a few minutes, they started to leave, a steady stream heading north. There were so many that the leaving itself took a few minutes. But then it was quiet and they were gone, black specks headed north, a few blocks or a few hundred miles.

It was a wonderful ten minutes or so. I was reminded of the cicadas in 2004.