There is something sad, no depressing, about the end of the bird migration - like my friends have all gone. I look out at my water and the usual cast of characters is there but no warblers, no splash of color, no unique chirping or singing or odd noises that these birds make. I know I still have a vast population of birds that live here for the summer - and new ones at that - but they aren't the ones that make my heart sing, that give me cause to rush giggling to a window at the possibility of a sighting, a glimmer of color, the shudder of a leave, a head peering out teasing me of what it hides just waiting to thrill me, to flood my eyes with a miracle. There is something about what has just passed that is proof of God to me - that there is something out there and in here that can create such beauty and uniqueness - and replicated as a species - each species looking the same and calling the same so at to allow me to identify it uniquely.
I am sad, almost to tears that the migration is winding down or over for this year. Even a lagging, hurried straggler is now only a reminder that the trees won't drip with this thrill I feel when I experience a warbler or other migrant - no sudden flash of movement and an orgasm of delight and bodily fulfillment that just seeing such a bird can bring. I feel alive in May in Minnesota. I feel like a school boy with a crush on the most beautiful girl in the school when she occasionally looks my way and smiles. I am giddy in May. What I do carry for the rest of the year is the realization that miracles are real and that perhaps I am one of them - but still I find myself rationalizing. For me there is nothing compared to a warbler - so small and yet so huge in beauty, energy, frailty - like a flower - and I can buy a flower at a store, I can own a video, I can marry a woman, I can be a father - but there is something about the freedom and huge honor endowed on me to see a flood of warblers as they pass by. And they don't make it easy. I work to see them. I sweat to see them. I spend money. I drive. I cancel meetings and human events to earn the right to just see them. Life would not be the same without them - uniquely not the same. I have been married before and divorced. I have owned things and lost things - all things that I thought would make me happy and fulfill me if only for a moment - often just in the flash of buying something for things often sit on shelves after they are bought. But not the annual migration of birds that flit by me on their way to somewhere else. Millions and I am thrilled with seeing the select few that happen before my binoculars as they pause to eat and drink or avoid the weather. This year there were many I didn't see and many species of which I saw only one representative - and I was overwhelmed in that moment of viewing and frenetically eager to perhaps see the ones I missed. And with my sadness and absolute forlornness, I smile faintly in my realization that next year . . . . maybe another chance to see them dripping off the trees. These warblers. Thomas Maiello Spring Lake Park
