finding our flock in turbulent times

Writing from Philipsburg, Montana, as night softens into a pale blush dawn over a western horizon of slumbering hills wrapped in blankets of fir and pine, I’m waiting for the Bohemian Waxwings to feather the skeletal limbs of a bare tree that I think is a planted Siberian elm. It’s seven degrees, warmer than yesterday morning when the thermometer threatened to trend below zero but stopped at two.

On this last day of our family gathering over Thanksgiving, flocks are on my mind and the way of birds finding safety, comfort, conversation, food, and shuffling wings to create room for one another. I’m overflowing with the abundance we shared and the uplift I feel, like the patterned lines, arrows, and bows of snow geese we witnessed–so white against a bluebell sky as we stood far below in fresh powdery snow flashing diamonds in the sun.

Within minutes of our arrival here in the historic old mining town on healing hills of a valley below the Flint Creek Range and within view of the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness, close to a hundred Bohemian Waxwings flew into the upper branches of the tree I watch now. Like blown leaves pulled back to their stems, the waxwings quivered and gave voice to the tree. Their high-pitched trills rained down from above quenching my thirst and longing. Always stirring within–that desire for feathers, flight, and untethering from gravity.

Nomadic birds from the far north, Bohemian Waxwings can form murmurations of thousands, sometimes shaped like a shifting horn of plenty as they whistle across a winter Montana sky seeking trees with berries, lingering buds, and sustenance. Like Cedar Waxwings, the tips of their tails look dipped in yellow paint but their undertails are rust instead of white and their black masked faces and crests are tinged in peach.

Over our four nights together, temperatures plummeted, winds gusted, and snow feathered down upon white-tailed deer wandering the dirt roads by quirky houses–the old, leaning, artsy, rusty, and new along dirt “streets laid out by the insane” as the great poet Richard Hugo penned in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.”

And from the storm, sunshine kissed the fresh snow as we wandered to the edge of Echo Lake to look up to hear the echoing calls so very far above us and watch magnificent flocks of snow geese etching the sky–teaching us bird by bird how to give lift to one another. Air spilling from the wing of a leading goose forms a corkscrew updraft–a tip vortex-that buoys the goose behind. They take turns so the whole flock may save energy for long flights south. Their chorusing high honking carries an urgency and a language of sky, clouds, and community.

Leaning back and aiming my IPhone at the sky above the snowy pinnacles of spruce and lodgepole pine, I filmed one of the many skeins–this one that morphed from a sideways “Y” into a shell-like necklace of black-tipped white birds. Later, I zoomed in to see how the birds shifted effortlessly –some slipping back, and others forward into a new formation.

Now, as our flock packs up to go our separate ways, I feel our strengthened family connection from our time over Thanksgiving in a house that offered us respite from news and social media, and the gifts of cooking together, playing Wingspan, and backwards walking into a headwind, laughing.

In turbulent times, we have much to learn from the ways of waxwings and snow geese. We can all be leaders as long as someone is right there behind us ready to take over and let us rest, as long as we can all feel the uplift of our spirits.