Birds Migrating Overhead

Look up. They are passing.

A line of them, or a V, or a loose cloud, high enough that the individual birds are small, moving together in a direction that has been their direction for longer than any record can confirm. The migration is older than the landscape below it. The routes existed before the fields were fields, before the roads were roads, before a single building interrupted the view from above.

The birds do not see what you see when they look down. They see the water and the geography, the shape of the coast in one of several configurations stored in the body's compass. They navigate by sun and stars and magnetic field lines and the smell of the air and by the birds beside them and possibly by things no researcher has yet identified. They know where they are going. Not in the conscious way you know a destination. In a deeper way. A way stored so far inside the body that to call it knowledge may understate it.

Count them if you can. You probably cannot. They are too many or too fast or too high. But try. The attempt to count them forces the eye to follow, to move with them, to stay with the flock in real time. And real time is the point. The flock is moving at thirty or forty or fifty kilometres an hour. It is passing over you now. In two minutes it will be gone from your sky.

Think about where they have been. Thousands of kilometres behind them and thousands ahead. A crossing, maybe, of water so wide that no land was visible for days. Flying at night over an ocean, the stars above and the dark water below and the magnetic field threading through the body pointing the way. Everything the journey required was already inside them before they left.

The point of departure and the point of arrival have been the same points for generations. The bird does not know this. The knowledge is in the wings, not the mind. But generations of the same birds crossing the same sky to the same place, year after year, for tens of thousands of years, have made a groove in the world, a kind of path that exists in air.

Your ancestors looked up and saw this. Whatever their century, whatever their situation, there were seasons when the birds came over and seasons when they left, and the coming and going marked time in a way that calendars only formalized later. The birds were the first calendar. Their departure said: winter. Their return said: summer. The tilting of the earth, encoded in feathers.

The sound of them, if you are close enough. The calls passed between the flock, information about speed and direction, contact calls that say I am here, still here, keep going. The flock as a collective organism, each bird embedded in the group, flying in each other's slipstream, the V shape not decorative but aerodynamic, the lead position taken in turns, shared effort.

They are almost past. The last of them coming over now. The sky resuming its emptiness as they carry their business elsewhere.

Something vast just happened overhead and it required nothing from you except the looking up.

Look up more often. Vast things happen overhead more than you think.

...