This is my second spring migration since becoming a birder, and this year, I have found it especially grounding.
The birds tend to arrive in a predictable rhythm. I expected Wilson’s warblers—yellow with black caps—to show up at the end of March, and they did. I figured that if I went out today, the blue grosbeaks—rich cobalt with rusty wingbars—would be back, and they were. I knew that calliope hummingbirds—tiny with streaky magenta throats—pass through specifically in the third week of April, and that if I went to places with flowering black sage, I’d find some. I did, and I did. I knew that the local canyon wrens—rusty red, white throat, long bill—would start singing, and if I went to the park where they’re sometimes seen, find the largest rockface, and whistle an imitation of their song, which sounds like a wren that’s running out of batteries, I might tempt one to pop out. I did, and it did.
We are suffering the rule of people so piteous that they can only exist in the world by concocting their own false version of it, and then imprinting that lie onto everyone else. America’s educational infrastructure and scientific enterprise are being sledgehammered to death. Government sites are now prime sources of disinformation. Doublespeak abounds. The attacks, and the feelings of overwhelm they engender, are relentless by design. Against that backdrop, I have found birding—and spring migration, in particular—to be a salve. At a time of chaos, it offers consistency. Amid a sea of lies, it offers reality.
Last week, I stood in a woodland just off the Texas coast, watching songbirds stream in after a long flight over the Gulf of Mexico—a reminder of the connectedness of the world and the utterly arbitrary nature of borders. And despite the slow season, I’ve largely found the birds I wanted to find in the places, times, and habitats in which I expected to find them—a reminder that the world is knowable, understandable, at least partly predictable, and all the more beautiful and wondrous for all of those things. When I scan the news, nothing makes sense. When I step outside and raise my binoculars to the sky, everything does.