Spiraling Cranes

There were clouds in the west over the hills, but there was also clear sky here and there where the afternoon sun sometimes shined thru.

I saw them first from a distance with the clouds and hills behind them. Their formation was broken, with many V's appearing and disappearing, breaking off and then returning to blend with the others. They were fighting chaos, each bird flapping and turning this way or that to keep some semblance of order, to follow the leader, to fly in formation. But the winds kept breaking them apart.

Then the birds at the lead banked to the left in a long, slow arc back to those in the rear. They turned and the others followed. The formation folded in on itself, and it was hard to say who was ahead and who was behind.

And as others turned left, and some others, and some more, it was no longer a broken formation with many pieces trying to reform but a single spiraling mass of northbound cranes that had found the updrafts off the Balcones Escarpment.

Periodically breaking thru, the afternoon sun lit their feathers from above, and as their dark silhouettes banked and turned against the grey clouds in the west, you could catch a glint of white off of each one for just a moment. But their were so many of them; a momentary glint off of each was like the shimmering of sunlit waves in the water.

They banked, and they turned. They spiraled, and they climbed. The sunlight glistened and glimmered off of them.

The rush hour traffic took me south. The prevailing breezes took them north.

They have much farther to go than I.

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