Some events are simply too big for us to comprehend. Bird migration, for example, occurs twice a year on a brain-bruising planetary scale, so we are forced to look for evidence in the tracks all around us: skeins of geese and vanguards of vireos in the sky; a four-day mob of warblers passing through the neighborhood on their way from one place to another. A murdered Waxwing below a living room window, its semi-annual journey stopped short across the sky on a pane of glass. The Baltimore oriole that arrives in the yard next to mine every May 1 or 2 and begins announcing its availability for a mate. Up to 3.5 billion birds and more than 600 species migrate across North America each spring, mostly at night, but we can usually only see them by looking up from the ground.
BirdCast it lets us look down from above, and that changes everything. A joint project of Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Colorado State University, and U. Mass Amherst, is a website that allows us to see them from a vantage point hundreds of miles above Earth, capturing the continental migration each night as the collected by more than 140 radar stations across the country: data collected on birds in flight. The site launched to the public in 2018, when my own birding was deepening from a lifelong side project into something more personal, even spiritual, necessary: a way of being in the world that I found hard to find elsewhere. . After 40 mostly satisfying years as a film critic, I began to feel all those imaginary visions closing in on my head. He longed to shake them off, to return to reality; Bird watching has come to seem like one of the most elegant ways to do it. (So has Zen meditation, and the overlap between the two can sometimes be almost complete: each activity teaches you to be very present while encouraging the self to dissolve.)
For me, the Nighttime BirdCast map is a corrective to our human-centric view of the planet.
I discovered BirdCast through a friend and fellow birder I call Hardcore Jim, because he’s the type of person who takes sparrow courses online. For the past few springs, Jim has been helping me learn to watch birds by ear, to separate the robin-like chirps from a rosy-breasted grosbeak or a scarlet tanager from, um, a robin, which, a time you master the language as a tourist. , it’s like a giant auditory map that unfolds in front of you. BirdCast is like that, but much bigger. From sunset to sunrise, a mosaic image is created approximately every 15 minutes from radar data that has been algorithmically collected and filtered to separate overhead bird passage from weather phenomena, bats, insects and other objects in the air, and then collected on a continental map. Sweeping in a loop, the ornithological journey changes from a muted purple to a hands-on neon yellow as the numbers increase. Not much to see in, say, February. In April and May, the map is a rainbow of arrival, a procession of feathers as bright as a pride parade.
Conceptually, the site is beyond impressive. If birding on the ground gives you the micro of individual species and individual birds, BirdCast brings an unexpected macro perspective that works like science and art, number crunching and airborne prayer. Last year, the team behind the site introduced a migration dashboard that allows users to search by state and county, so you can see who flew over your head last night, and based on arrivals from previous years, have a good estimate of who. it will. wandering through your woods in the morning. (Since the technology isn’t good at identifying individual species, the researchers rely on local birders, happily known as ground verifiers, to develop their data.)
Even without the local angle, BirdCast prompts a radical reconsideration of bird behaviour, global processes, and our involvement in and responsibilities towards both. At first I thought that technology gave users a new perspective on migration from God’s point of view, but now I understand that the point of view is that of an administrator. Watching the night trail on BirdCast, I think of my early days birding in Central Park, a great avian funnel of the Anthropocene Era, where tens of thousands of birds stop each spring after crossing Greater New York, and near where Every spring, thousands of birds are killed in collisions with night-lit skyscrapers, their bodies littering the corporate fountains below. The sheer numbers BirdCast records lead us to wonder: What do we owe these temporary neighbors as they go? Do we huddle in the park’s Ramble just to take a look? Or do we turn off the lights to save their lives?
The nighttime BirdCast map has come to mean a lot to me, especially as a corrective to our human-centric view of the planet. BirdCast reorients us both in space and in time. It changes our understanding of ecosystems from the narrow (the street, the neighborhood, the city) to a vast globe that birds traverse twice a year because they have to. Looking at that incessant neon flow forces the viewer to recognize patterns that predate our appearance on the stage and unless we succeed in our drive to kill everything on the planet, they could outlast us much longer. Within this age, what matters, a bird setting out on a journey a thousand miles long, not data, but feathers and bones, is still here. But BirdCast helps us see that creature and ourselves as fractals of a bigger picture in which we are infinitely smaller but bound by awareness and obligation.
Ty Burr writes the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List. From 2002 to 2021, he was a film critic at The Boston Globe.
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