This week the birds are flying north. On an eggshell blue morning I catch sight of strings of them in formation, reeling and unreeling like the tail of a kite or slow motion billowing of silk used in rhythmic gymnastics. Mostly, the strings of 40 - 100 birds look like a wide ‘V’. So many squadrons, one shifting and fluttering after the other, an avian assault on the warmer Pacific.
Seasonal changes happen subtly. Friends look at me dubiously when I say the light is changing, the cicadas are dying, there’s a moment of chill in the evenings. But the birds always confirm it for me that autumn is here. I’m no bird expert: they may be godwits migrating some unbelievable distance, or native oystercatchers…whichever, they tell me that the roosting places around the Manukau must be getting chill.
There is never one particular day when you know, suddenly, that it’s the next season. It’s a gradual accumulation of changes. The angle of the daylight, the colour of the sky. The birds fly north.
