Log with Liv

I was driving on the highway in the rain this week when a flock of migrating birds passed over me. The sky was dark and it was pouring outside as these birds struggled in the rain whilst maintaining their ‘V’ formation. It seemed to take them ages to cross the sky as they lost and gained height, fighting against the rain. I watched the birds above me flap tirelessly, over and over, their wings a consistent beat to the somber song of displacement and pointlessness. It struck me as so profoundly futile, something akin to absurdity, even. To be a bird flying through a storm because of some wild urge programmed in my DNA to migrate every fall. To upend my life (albeit a bird’s life) every year until I die for a hundreds to thousands-mile-long journey in hope of warmer weather.

Migration is an instinct for birds. It is a tug on their stomach each year to abandon the sanctuaries that they have cultivated throughout the more recent months. It is an escapist’s excuse, a defeatist’s way out. Other animals would have evolved to survive colder weather, but birds? They learned to run (or, well, fly). 

Fun fact: birds always return home to where they were born. Only, this fact is just fun in name, because there is nothing I find enjoyable about being dragged away from life by an unidentifiable urge. To work tirelessly on a weeks-long journey to reach what is supposedly a “better place,” just to be swept under the influence of this same urge a few months later, propelling you back to where you came from. It seems awfully tiring, being forced to comply with the every whim of some feeling deep within your gut. I cannot imagine the exhaustion of repeating the same trip time and time again, a horrible cycle of coming and going for the rest of your life.

Another “miserable” fact, you might ask? Birds migrate at night. As if being controlled by this urge was not enough, now you must travel away from your home during the cover of night, the cold seeping into your bones and the dark tangling in your wings. The night renders the trip a solitary one, transforming a flock migration into essentially a solo passage. To add to the downright stupidity of the migration process, birds frantically propel themselves through the air at shocking speeds while in the depths of night, hoping, I guess, that they will make it to Mexico, and not wind up dead on the side of a cell tower or wind turbine.

Birds lack control. Their entire lives are predetermined. Their location at all times decided by forces much larger than themselves, and yet they are looked at as totems of independence. An animal characterized by utmost freedom, bound by nothing, not even the tricky confines of gravity. And yet, driven to abandonment each year by a compulsion to escape. What does it matter that you can fly if the choice is not yours?

I’m probably overthinking it. After all, it’s birds—what do they really matter? If I have not already been transparent in my bias, I do not particularly like birds. As far as I am concerned, they are nothing more than flying rats. Birds are probably worse than rats, too. For one, I am positive that birds would have a massive ego because of their ability to fly. Imagine rats, but with audacity. Birds are dinosaurs (google it, it’s true). Imagine how insufferable birds must be, having survived the very extinction that took out 65-ton reptiles.  

I started this post with the intention of describing how I pitied birds for having to partake in such a pointless, tiresome journey due to migration instincts in their genes…at about 500 words in, I remembered that I hated birds. Migration is karmic justice, as far as I am concerned. An attempt from whatever sick celestial being who created these disease-carrying, beak-pecking rodents that could fly to undo their grave mistake. 

A final horrible fact to think about: there are around 50 billion birds in the world. That is seven birds per person. Do you feel confident in your ability to fight seven birds at once? You could fend off seven songbirds, maybe, but what about an ostrich? Or two four-foot-tall storks with eight-foot wingspans? How confident are you in your odds now? People need to worry less about robots taking over the world and instead look to the sky with fear.

Be thankful for migration, I guess. For even if it is not attempted heavenly rectification, it means a few bird-free months.