Antonio, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in his fascination with the fact that, according to ornithologists, 340 million birds will migrate across the skies of the US tonight.
The incredible timeless night migration of birds is now being negatively affected by human light pollution, the avion experts report, but so far has apparently escaped politicization, except in Florida where DeSantis demands that school children be deprived of all bird and human migratory information, and Audubon members be prevented from uttering such phrases as “birds of a feather.”
There is an odd comfort for the keeper and his ilk in gazing up into the night sky of this contrary cold April and contemplating the mysterious, invisible activity of birds as they proceed with their unique private lives, magnificently indifferent to the ways of that species claiming the highest branch of the evolutionary tree and looking only to get to the perfect place on the planet to nest.
Having already located their perfect place to nest, the keeper and Phyllis have no desire to join the migrating birds–night-driving is enough of a challenge, night-flying would be out of the question. But they will gaze skyward tonight and toast the bar-tailed godwit that may be somewhere up there in the darkness on its 7,987-mile, 224-hour flight from New Zealand to the Alaska mud flats–the perfect nesting place.
