The Primacy of Movement

I am watching the fall migration pattern of red-tailed hawks across the North American continent. Small yellow circles on a lightly shaded map bobble through time and space, moving south as the seasons progress. Midsummer sees a handful of yellow avatars, symbolic hawks, just beyond the northwestern span of the Chugach Mountains in Alaska. July slips into August into September and October, and the bobbles slip down as far south as La Paz in Baja, Mexico City, almost to Guatemala. The Audubon Society’s Bird Migration Explorer—a beautifully interactive compendium of research on bird migration across the globe—visualizes the migration patterns of hundreds of species of birds. Some turkey vultures spend summers in the northwest mountain ranges, then seem to drop, all at once, tumbling down the lines of flight along the Rocky Mountains and Sierras down through Mexico and Panama, to Venezuela and the top of Colombia in September, October, and November. Snow geese perform elegant, elongated swoops across North America. I toggle between species, delighting in a visualized show of their migration that seems to be—from my computer’s-eye view—giddy, free, pleasing in its easy slide.

Paying attention to these simulated (and of course, simplified) patterns of migration soothes the anxiety I feel about the costs of staying in one place. Perhaps nature can help us to remember the primacy of movement, its accord with natural, and not national, boundaries.