If I hadn't
Oct. 21st, 2002 11:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynbeen seeing this go on for the past four Octobers, I'd be worried about the local level of general omenry - it's swarming season for the local starlings.
No, seriously, the little imported menaces* get together in huge flocks that don't seem to be bothering to migrate for about two or three weeks this time of year, every year. They're most common at sunset or close to it; when I drive home around 4:40, 4:45 PM in the evenings, there's usually a week or two when the starlings suddenly stream out over Highway 46 en masse, looking like an extraordinarily diffuse serpentine dragon. I don't think they properly flock together until close to nightfall, but during the day a lot of them gang up on the lawn outside my office window, and a bunch of them just dropped out of the nearest large tree and landed on said lawn in what looked like a feather waterfall.
This means crow season can't be far behind. There's a stretch of year in the late part of October and parts of November - maybe even later - when, at around 5 PM EST, the crows pass overhead in threes and fours. They're usually flying east, and there's an enormous number of them, but they fly very high up and they're not flocking. There's just a few birds every minute or so, almost too high up to see, cruising along for... who knows what. I think it's the local murder - there's a couple of VERY big murders of crows that make their residences in this area, including one that's the absolute despair of local car dealers because guess where their flight path takes them?
On a slightly more unusual note, there are still blossoms on two of the plum trees. Including one that hadn't bloomed before I went to Canada. Tres odd.
*Fifty strokes of the heavy bamboo to the moron who wanted to bring every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to the United States, for we would not have the foul-tempered, swarming invaders known as starlings without their idiotic ecological intervention.
No, seriously, the little imported menaces* get together in huge flocks that don't seem to be bothering to migrate for about two or three weeks this time of year, every year. They're most common at sunset or close to it; when I drive home around 4:40, 4:45 PM in the evenings, there's usually a week or two when the starlings suddenly stream out over Highway 46 en masse, looking like an extraordinarily diffuse serpentine dragon. I don't think they properly flock together until close to nightfall, but during the day a lot of them gang up on the lawn outside my office window, and a bunch of them just dropped out of the nearest large tree and landed on said lawn in what looked like a feather waterfall.
This means crow season can't be far behind. There's a stretch of year in the late part of October and parts of November - maybe even later - when, at around 5 PM EST, the crows pass overhead in threes and fours. They're usually flying east, and there's an enormous number of them, but they fly very high up and they're not flocking. There's just a few birds every minute or so, almost too high up to see, cruising along for... who knows what. I think it's the local murder - there's a couple of VERY big murders of crows that make their residences in this area, including one that's the absolute despair of local car dealers because guess where their flight path takes them?
On a slightly more unusual note, there are still blossoms on two of the plum trees. Including one that hadn't bloomed before I went to Canada. Tres odd.
*Fifty strokes of the heavy bamboo to the moron who wanted to bring every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to the United States, for we would not have the foul-tempered, swarming invaders known as starlings without their idiotic ecological intervention.
