My daily bicycle commute takes me through the parking lot of Highland Mall, a shopping opportunity that has seen better days. One sign of the decline is the swarm of birds near the entrance to the parking lot.
At sunset today, I went to watch the thousands of birds circle in to land at their sleeping roost, and I captured this video.
In this closer video you clearly hear the swarm chirping and flapping wings.
In this enhanced night-shot, you can get an impression of how tightly the birds pack the trees.
All the little white spots are bird eyeballs.
I was certainly not the only gawker. It’s not as popular as the bats, but the swarm attracted about a dozen cars, all slewed haphazardly across white lines in the expansively empty parking lot, while in the distance, teenagers whooped and hollered near the mall entrance.
Old ladies and birding enthusiasts came over to where I sat with my tripod to see what I was doing. I asked the first one if the birds were swallows and she looked kinda shocked, as if I couldn’t remember the name of the president. She politely told me that the birds were purple martins. Which, she added, were also swallows.
You might be familiar with purple martins through the giant, multi-storied bird houses on poles that people build for them, which are invariably colonized by sparrows.
All afternoon I had been working on tricking out my digital camera so it would have longer battery life. What I did to it was too brutal, too ugly to qualify as modding.
Basically I drilled holes through the case and soldered wires directly to the battery leads. I realize that there is a power-supply plug for this camera, but I was in a hurry and I didn’t have anything that would fit the tiny little hole.
That poor camera is beginning to look as shot-out as my bicycle.
But longer battery life made it possible to shoot a time-lapse video of the purple martin swarm settling in for the night. None of which you can really see at youtube resolutions. Ask me to show it to you the next time you see me with my tablet PC.
The downside of this amazing spectacle of nature, which butts up against our culture’s greatest institution of consumerism, is all the poop.
I got tagged twice just taking this picture.
The first time it rained this summer the field of bird poop curdled and took on the odor of a wet dog. A dead wet dog. You can smell it for three blocks in every direction.
But that’s just part of the wonder of nature.