![]() ![]() With the fist winter snows, blue grouse leave the more temperate foothills of the Western mountains and migrate - on foot, no less - into the bitter, wind-drifted high country, searching for conifer needles to eat.Ī very few travel even beyond the bounds of the hemisphere. They don’t all follow the expected course, nor do they always travel by wing. ![]() Even within the tropics, a land where migration would seem unnecessary, birds move with the seasonal rains and droughts across hundreds of miles, following the blossoming of flowers or the ripening of fruit. ![]() In the snow squalls of December, goshawks and golden eagles fly south along the ridges of the Appalachians, over oak trees that rattle their last stiff, dead leaves at the wind. ![]() In the middle of July, Hudsonian godwits lift off from the iceberg-choked shorts of the Beaufort Sea, heading southeast along the northern rim of Canada to Labrador, then vaulting south in a nonstop flight to Venezuela. If it is spring or fall, the great pivot points of the year, then the continents are swarming with billions of traveling birds - a flood so great that even the most ignorant and unobservant notice, if nothing else, the skeins of geese and flocks of robins.īut the migration’s breadth goes far beyond those obvious watersheds, shifting endlessly across distance and season. Across the Hemisphere with Migratory BirdsĪt whatever moment you read these words, day or night, there are birds aloft in the skies of the Western Hemisphere, migrating. ![]()
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