Fallout

The lighthouse keeper on Machias Seal Island — kept there by the Canadian Coast Guard to make sure the little island, claimed by both Canada and the US, stays Canadian, O Canada… but I digress — the lighthouse keeper took this sequence of photos on the night of May 24 this year. Bad weather caused a fallout of birds. Masses of migrant songbirds, mostly warblers, were forced out of the sky and onto the only available piece of land, ten miles off-shore. It’s hard to imagine the hundreds of millions of birds that fly during migration, even though they can be tracked on radar, but freak happenings like this give some suggestion of the phenomenon.