The Birds

I had to go into town this morning. 

I was about a mile from the house, turning onto the main road when the largest flock of birds I have ever seen took to the sky. They were in the pasture to the right of the road. I think that’s the Goodmans’ farm, but I’m not completely sure. Whoever owns the land had made hay recently, and I was thinking maybe the birds were eating the seed that got knocked loose in the process.

The birds took off and headed over the road and split into two different flocks. Each of them was still larger than any flock I’d ever seen before. I came to a complete stop in the road. Visions of them crashing through my windshield like some half-remembered scene from The Birds coming unbidden into my brain. I couldn’t see through the flock to the other side, at all, for maybe 10 seconds.

I’ve been to bridge in Austin, the one up the road from the state capital, where all the bats live. I’ve watched them come out, en masse, at dusk. 

The number of bats I saw come out from under that bridge was maybe a quarter of the birds I saw this morning. They wheeled. They evaded. They spread out across pastures on both sides of the road, landed in the grass and were gone again, far enough now from the road that they were unbothered by my passing.

I drove on into town, the sky completely clear of birds again.

I don’t know was visually more surprising, the number of birds that suddenly appeared out of nowhere and flooded the sky, or the way every last one of them vanished from sight again half a minute later.