The Night Has Wings

While we were sleeping Friday night, 1.2 billion birds were in the air over the United States stirring our dreams with their wings.

Friday night. I dreamed of flying. Psychologists says that next to sex and money, the most common subject of dreams is flight. A Scientific American study asked schoolchildren across the country what other creature they would most like to be and the answer was, overwhelmingly, “a bird.” For many of us this time of year our dreams have wings. And the reason is not difficult to pinpoint.

According to Birdcast.info, a website that tracks the annual fall migration, on the night of October 6-7th over 1.2 billion birds were recorded moving over the United States. It was the first time the site has ever recorded a “billion bird” night. There were 89.3 million birds said to be in the skies over Wisconsin, including 8.9 million over the Apostle Islands and Bayfield County.

If birds left tracks in the sky, the air over the Islands would be ribboned with threads spooling down towards the south like a ball of colored yarn rolling downhill, fast. And, since some 80% of birds migrate at night beginning 30 to 45 minutes after sunset and peaking three or four hours later, the skies became a silent river of birds passing overhead while we were sleeping, stirring our dreams with their wings.

Since as far back as the 1950’s, the Apostle Islands have been recognized as an important way-marker in that river of wings, a part of one of the most heavily-traveled migratory routes through the Great Lakes region. It is easy to see why. The twenty-two Apostle Islands (including Madeline Island which is outside of the National Lakeshore) act like giant stepping stones for migrating birds hop-scotching their way across the cold blue waters of Lake Superior. Shorter flights island-to-island minimize their exposure to long, more dangerous crossings of open water.

Outer (one of the northmost islands) and Long Island (the furthest south) act as critical stop-over points for migratory birds such as passerines, hawks, falcons, waterfowl, and shorebirds as they connect the dots on migration routes that can span thousands of miles and stitch together countries, even continents, with the threads of their wingbeats.

It is one of the great rhythms of nature, the pulse of the planet. Each fall in North America, several billion birds migrate between breeding grounds as far north as Greenland and the Canadian Arctic to wintering habitat as far south as Terra del Fuego. The majority of the world’s 8,600 bird species exhibit some kind of migratory behavior — from relatively short changes in elevation to the 22,000-mile round trip of the Arctic tern that spans the globe. On any given October night when the conditions are right, upwards of a billion birds can be on the move across the United States.

Here in the Apostles, over 300 bird species have been recorded. The great majority of the nesting species in the Islands (89%) pack up and migrate in the fall, joining the parade of species that nest further north in Canada and use the flyway over the islands on their own trips south. Redstarts, ruby-throated hummingbirds, a rainbow of warblers, grosbeaks, blackbirds, ovenbirds, loons, herons, nuthatches, goldfinches, flickers, kingfishers and more.

The reasons birds migrate seem relatively easy to understand: birds are driven north in search of food, by the longer daylight hours to eat and breed, the right habitat to raise young, and then urged south again as falling temperatures and dwindling daylight seep into the islands in the fall.

Perhaps a more interesting question is how? How does a creature sometimes only a few months old and weighing less than a deep breath undertake a journey of thousands of miles over unknown territory running a gauntlet of predators, storms, water crossings, and man-made hazards, all on little more than two wings and a prayer?

Some of the answers are still shrouded in mystery but ornithologists believe that migrating birds use celestial cues to navigate, in essence steering by the stars. But they may also follow landscape features like rivers and mountain ranges, lakeshores and island chains. They may take cues from the prevailing winds, and even use the ability to detect the magnetic field of the earth in plotting their routes across the continent. Along the way, they gather at traditional “stop-over” habitats to refuel, spots that may have been used each migration season for thousands of years by countless generations of migrating birds before them.

One of the prime stop-over spots in the Apostle Islands is the long, crooked-fingered sandspit on the southern tail of Outer Island. Autumn migrating birds moving south out of Minnesota and Canada come across Lake Superior aiming at Outer Island as their first stopping point, the first “hop” in the “hop-scotch.” As the first waystation in that long, arduous crossing, the sandspit on Outer Island has become a gathering spot for a wide variety of species creating at times what writer Michael Van Stappen has called “a wild circus” of birds. As many as 800 hawks, mostly broad-wings, have been counted spiraling in the air at once over the sandspit. During an exceptional migration season, birders counted more than 140,000 birds of 107 different species there, as many as 28,000 birds in a single hour. From the remote security of that sandspit, the migrating flocks rest, feed, and then take flight again, bound for the Gulf Coast, Mexico, Central and South America, tying our Apostle Islands and distant countries together with ribbons of wingbeats.

Van Stappen, who witnessed the migration spectacle from Outer Island, writes in his book Northern Passage, “Standing on that sandspit with birds streaming by in farewell flight to the mainland and places far beyond, the overwhelming urge is not to ponder or to wonder, not to linger or go home. It is autumn, and in your heart the singular, deeply felt sense, is to follow.”

There was a time in my life when that urge “to follow” would have been nearly overwhelming. I too have known that pull, that slow ache for other horizons. There is a German word, “zugunruhe,” that descirbes the restlessness before migration, a feeling that many of us may well understand and have felt in our own lives. But lives, like seasons, change. My dreams these days are of knowing this place more deeply, not of discovering distant places. I know that after such a mass exodus, the woods will no longer chortle with the warble of warblers and the jibber-jabber of jays, the bays will ring hollow without the hello of the loon calls. But, that silence too is a part of the process, a means to a deeper understanding of this place with its rhythmic waves of migration, the coming and going of its seasons. And perhaps it is only by experiencing that silence that one can appreciate the bird calls when they are here, the silence between notes of a song.

So while I am grateful to live in a world stitched together by wings, only my eyes will follow. Under an autumn sky stirred by wings, I will drift like a cast off feather in the Little Dipper content to stay behind, to await the return of the birds again in spring.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photos by the author unless noted)

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