Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ pattern on its tail: a male yellow-rumped warbler. It flickers past and disappears around the corner of the building. A little while later, we see another flying the same way. Then another. It dawns on us that this is the same bird, circling. Another one joins it, both now drawn helplessly towards and around the light, reeling about the spire as if caught on invisible strings. Watching them dampens our exuberant mood. The spire is lit with pulsing rivulets of climbing colour like a candle tonight to mark the building’s eighty-fifth anniversary. And these birds have been attracted to it, pulled off course, their exquisite navigational machinery overwhelmed by light, leaving them confused and in considerable danger. After being mesmerised in this way, some birds drag themselves free and continue their journey. Others don’t.

      New York is among the brightest cities in the world after Las Vegas, only one node in a flood of artificial illumination that runs from Boston down to Washington. We cherish our cities for their appearance at night, but it takes a terrible toll on migrating songbirds: you can find them dead or exhausted at the foot of high-rise buildings all over America. Disoriented by light and reflections on glass, they crash into obstacles, fly into windows, spiral down to the ground. More than a hundred thousand die each year in New York City alone. Thomas King, of the New York pest-control company M&M Environmental, has had calls from residents of high-rise buildings asking him to deal with the birds colliding with their windows during migration season. He tells them that there’s no solution, but they can talk to their building manager about turning off the lights. It helps. Programmes like New York City Audubon’s ‘Lights Out New York’ have encouraged many high-rise owners to do the same, saving both energy and avian lives.

      Every year the ‘Tribute in Light’ shines twin blue beams into the Manhattan night as a memorial to the lives lost on September 11. They rise four miles into the air and are visible sixty miles from the city. On peak migration nights songbirds spiral down towards them, calling, pulled from the sky, so many circling in the light they look like glittering, whirling specks of paper caught in the wind. On one night last year, so many were caught in the beams that the few pixels representing the ‘Tribute’ site glowed super-bright on the radar maps. Farnsworth was there with the Audubon team that got the lights shut off intermittently to prevent casualties. They switched off the ‘Tribute’ eight times that night for about twenty minutes at a time, releasing the trapped birds to return to their journey. Each time the lights went back on, a new sweep of birds was drawn in – the twin towers made ghosts of light visited over and over by winged travellers intermittently freed into darkness before a crowd rushed in to take their place. Farnsworth is a lead scientist in BirdCast, a project that combines a variety of methods – weather data, flight calls, radar, observers on the ground – to predict the movements of migrating birds throughout the continental United States and forecast big nights like this that might require emergency lights-out action.

      The flow of birds over the observation deck continues, but it’s getting late. I make my farewell, take the elevator back down the building and wander uphill to my apartment. Though it’s long past midnight, I’m wide awake. Part of what high-rise buildings are designed to do is change the way we see. To bring us different views of the world, views intimately linked with prospect and power – to make the invisible visible. The birds I saw were mostly unidentifiable streaks of light, like thin retinal scratches or splashes of luminous paint on a dark ground. As I look up from street level, the blank sky above seems a very different place, deep and coursing with life.

      Two days later, I decide to walk in Central Park, and find it full of newer migrants that arrived here at night and stayed to rest and feed. A black-and-white warbler tacking along a slanted tree trunk deep in the Ramble, a yellow-rumped warbler sallying forth into the bright spring air to grab flies, a black-throated blue warbler so neat and spry he looks like a folded pocket handkerchief. These songbirds are familiar creatures with familiar meanings. It’s hard to reconcile them with the remote lights I witnessed in the sky.

      Living in a high-rise building bars you from certain ways of interacting with the natural world. You can’t put out feeders to watch robins and chickadees in your garden. But you are set in another part of their habitual world, a nocturne of ice crystals and cloud and wind and darkness. High-rise buildings, symbols of mastery over nature, can work as bridges towards a more complete understanding of the natural world – stitching the sky to the ground, nature to the city. For days afterwards, my dreams are full of songbirds, the familiar ones from woods and backyards, but also points of moving light, little astronauts, travellers using the stars to navigate, having fallen to Earth for a little while before picking themselves up and moving on.

The Human Flock

      Under heavy rain the lakes have turned to phosphorescent steel. Pygmy cormorants hunch on dead trees. Twelve of us stand on the shore. Some have set out spotting scopes on tripods on the grass, others carry binoculars. Silently we stand in wait for the Hungarian dusk. As the sun slips behind the expanse of water the air grows colder. We strain our ears until – there it is – we hear a faint noise like baying hounds or discordant bugles, at first hardly discernible through the wind rattling the reeds before it grows into an unearthly clamour. ‘Here they come!’ someone whispers. Overhead, a long, wavering chevron of beating wings is inked across the darkening sky. Behind it flow others, and there are others behind them, all passing overhead in ever-increasing waves, filling the air with a barrage of noise and beauty.

      The birds above us are long-necked, graceful Eurasian cranes. Every autumn more than a hundred thousand of them stop off on their southward migration from Russia and Northern Europe to spend a few weeks in the Hortobágy region of north-eastern Hungary, feeding on maize left in the fields after harvest. Every night they fly to roost in huge numbers in the safety of shallow fish-farm lakes, attracting wildlife tourists who come here to witness the spectacle of their evening flights. Similarly impressive congregations can be seen in other places. In Nebraska, more than half a million sandhill cranes fatten up in cornfields before continuing their spring migration; in Quebec, watchers are awed by blizzards of snow geese blotting out the sky as they rise from the Saint-François River. In Britain, clouds of wintering starlings flying to their roosts draw crowds of all ages.

      Standing close to vast masses of birds affects everyone differently: some people laugh, some cry, others shake their heads or utter profanities. Language fails in the face of immense flocks of beating wings. But our brains are built to wrest familiar meaning from the confusions of the world, and watching the cranes at dusk I see them first turn into strings of musical notation, then mathematical patterns. The snaking lines synchronise so that each bird raises its wings a fraction before the one behind it, each moving flock resolving itself into a filmstrip showing a single bird stretched through time. It is an astonishing illusion that makes me blink in surprise. But then, part of the allure of flocking birds is their ability to create bewildering optical effects. I remember my amazement as a child watching thousands of wading birds, knots, flying against a cool grey sky, vanish and reappear in an instant as the birds turned their counter-shaded bodies in the air. Perhaps the best-known example is the hosts of European starlings that assemble in the sky before they roost. We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black sun. It captures their almost celestial strangeness. Standing on the Suffolk coast a few years ago, I saw a far-flung mist of starlings turn in a split second into an ominous sphere like a dark planet hanging over the marshes. Everyone around me gasped audibly before it exploded in a maelstrom of wings.

      Though the rapid dynamism of flocking birds is a large part of their beauty, news sites and magazines often publish still photographs of murmurations that look like other things: sharks, mushrooms, dinosaurs. In 2015, an image of one flock over New York City shifting into the shape of Vladimir Putin’s face went viral, though it may have been fake. It’s not difficult, when presented with such a strange phenomenon, to believe in signs and wonders. The changing shape of starling flocks comes from each bird copying the motions of the six or seven others around it with extreme rapidity; their reaction time is less than a tenth of a second. Turns can propagate through a cloud of birds at speeds СКАЧАТЬ