It started as a low hum, like the sound a teakettle makes when the water hits a temperature a few dozen degrees shy of boiling. I heard it to my left, to the south, up the residential street that intersected with the one where I was running. It was dark still, or nearly so, with the sky to the east beginning to glow and the sky to the west yet too dark to see the mountains against it. I run this route every day when I’m in town, unless I’m feeling energetic enough to think of another way to go: up the hill, to the right, by the school, across the busy road, down the hill and to the right again and then again, along the long flat section by the churches, and then left and right back to home. It’s two and a half miles from start to finish, hardly an achievement, but I’ve done it daily (or something like it) for over six years now. I know all the sights and the sounds by heart—the hiss of the sprinklers, the golden glide of the urban foxes, the strange gentle rumble of the tires on an electric car. This hum was none of those sounds.
The sound built quickly into a crescendo, almost like a wave rolling in onto the sand. As it built, the low hum was overlaid with a high whine; as my brain searched its databases for something to compare it to, it occurred to me that perhaps the teakettle had reached a boil, and the steam was passing through the whistle top that some of them have, to let you know it’s ready. Of course there was no teakettle nearby, but my subconscious had already surfaced the possibility before my conscious mind had a chance to rule it out.
I scanned the dark street in the direction of the sound, and then the air, and I saw it—a cloud, moving, pulsating, surging forward, backlit against the predawn sky. It came together for me all at once: the hum was the beating of thousands of wings, the high whine was birdsong, and the cloud was a murmuration—a flock of migrating birds. I tried to make them out against the darkness. For a moment I wondered if they were bats, but when I could isolate one’s profile against the sky its wings were birdlike, not batlike, medium-sized and black, as far as I could tell. They were smaller than crows but larger than the songbirds that mostly live around here. The birds were interlopers on their way to somewhere else, not any that I knew, or at least not any that I could recognize in the darkness. They passed me over in a rush, the teakettle boiling over, and then they were gone, off into the sky to the north.
From the first sound to the last was no more than fifteen seconds. The hum, the high whine, the rush, the profile against the sky—it was all begun and ended in the time it took me to run 75 yards. I watched them recede into the cold morning air and I settled back in to my run. A mile later I came across them again, this time roosting in a tall maple tree, resting for a moment or for the day, I wasn’t sure. They were still chattering loudly, all of them, and dozens of them were flapping all at once as they left and claimed branch after branch in an energetic shuffle, and I thought that the people in the homes under the tree were probably waking to wonder what the sound was. Perhaps they rose out of bed to peer out the window and saw me running by. Perhaps they pulled on their slippers to look around on the way to get the newspaper. Perhaps they rolled over to drift off again, wondering to themselves who had put the teakettle on.
Great description of the sound. Really nice to read before sleeping. Secretly hoping I’ll witness the same phenomena in the pre dawn tomorrow.
Nice. What an interesting start to your day. How great to be there for the audio visual. I enjoyed briefly joining your early morning run through this recounting.