While hiking I heard a wind-like sound.  I didn’t immediately comprehend the sound because I thought I was about to get caught out in the rain.  Then I realized it couldn’t be the wind because the sound was too high-pitched.  Birds?  I questioned.  Birds.

Earlier in the morning I had seen a large flock of birds on the other side of a field.  So a few days later, when I managed to drag myself out of bed at six in the morning, I headed back to the same spot to see how large the flock might be.

The time stamp on the first picture I took that morning was 7:26 AM. 

 

I wondered how long I would see birds flying passed.  I figured two or three minutes.

Two minutes turned into five minutes…

which turned into ten minutes and the endless stream of birds continued on a southward flight.

Sometimes portions of a the stream of birds would settle onto a tree or group of trees.

Only to burst back into the air a few seconds later.

The final time stamp on the last picture I took was 7:41 AM.  For fifteen minutes a continuous ribbon of tens of thousands of small to medium sized birds streamed south.