Wings over America

Set indelibly in my mind against the backdrop of my travels through America are the sights and sounds of birds I observed in each place: the reverberating chattering of acrobatic White-Throated Swifts in the Badlands; farmland left fallow coming alive as thousands of Red-Winged Blackbirds take flight in synchrony; the stillness of a forest punctuated by the rhythmic drumming of a Pileated Woodpecker. In those moments, birds seem to be nothing less than the quintessence of American nature.