Open Writing

Since the time I began wintering in Florida, I have taken to sitting on my verandah about five in the evening when the weather permits. That’s my cocktail hour, and happily occurs at the same time as the sunsets in December and January. Initially, it was just the sunsets that drew me there. Then it evolved into a time when my neighbor joins me, and we discuss the matters of the day.

Mostly, those matters are of little consequence to either of us, and certainly not to the rest of the world, but they need to be discussed just the same. On occasion, the topics are of greater import, and receive appropriately more consideration: family problems, concerns about health and mortality, our perception of the decline in social values, and the like.

Serendipitously, the cocktail hour, our discussions and the sunset happen to coincide with the return of a host of birds from their feeding grounds in the shallows and mangrove thickets of Port Charlotte harbor. My locality, like the rest of Florida, has an abundance of birds, and a wide variety of species to delight the eye. An added bonus is their relative fearlessness, engendered as it is by an abundance of food and a lack of enemies.

There are the wading birds such as Egrets and Ibis; a variety of herons and hawks; waterfowl, tidewater birds such as Spoonbills, Sandpipers and Plover; seagulls, and everybody’s favorite clowns, the Pelicans. A rare and wonderful sight are the Wood Storks, straight from an old Chinese or Japanese painting, the black markings on their wings like Chinese calligraphy. All these major performers are supported by a cast of hundreds of less imposing species like kingfishers, and cardinals.

Though all the birds are a pleasure to observe, I get the biggest thrill of all from watching large flocks in flight. In the course of my pre-prandial hour, I would estimate that anything up to a thousand birds pass through my field of view on a good evening. When they occasionally approach over the roof of my house, there are so many that I hear the rush of their wings seconds before they sweep into view.

Each species has its own style of flying in formation. The Ibis and Egrets fly in a loose order of a hundred or so birds, constantly swirling and wheeling, with no consistent leader. Occasionally, a sub-flock will break away to paint its own pattern in the sky. The Cormorants fly more purposefully in small groups, apparently with neither the time nor inclination for aerobatics. Occasionally, a lone Cormorant will trail the flock by a half a mile or so, and I’m left to wonder what delayed it when the others decided it was time to go home.

The Pelicans fly in groups of four or five, and seem to have some hidden source of propulsion. These modern, feathered Pterodactyls glide for extended periods on up-draughts without flapping a wing, even when they are literally skimming the water. Ungainly on land, they are like high performance military jets in the air. This illusion lasts only until they reach their mangrove roosts, when they literally crash into the branches, causing a cascade of other Pelicans that they dislodge in the process.

A part of the magic of watching this free air-show is the dramatic and dynamic fluidity of the flocks. They swoop and wheel and turn, divide and rejoin at high speed, almost as if they have been choreographed. Before hurricane Charley decimated the Australian Pines, their scintillating finale would be enacted against the black silhouettes of those trees, back lit by the tangerine sky of the setting sun. A sight I won’t see again in my lifetime, at least not from this verandah.

I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation for the way the flocks perform, and if there is, I don’t want to be enlightened. I’m content with my romantic allegory. Sometimes there’s just too much science.

John can be contacted at wordworks@hvc.rr.com