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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

Swallow Flocks Amid the Dunes Conjure a Spirit of Wonder

eyesontheroad / flickr

One day last week I took a walk in the Provincelands dunes. I started from the parking area at High Head and walked west through the area known as the “parabolic dunes.” These are wind-shaped formations with distinct contours: wide, smooth, low valleys surrounded by ridges of sand in a bent-bow or parabolic shape. These formations have been shaped by the prevailing northwest winds and they slowly move south-east, burying everything in front of them. 

After a half hour or so I stopped and had lunch at one of the easternmost of the remaining dune shacks in the Provincelands. This shack, a two-story structure with a wrap-around deck, is actually built on the second dune ridge back from the beach, so that one looks out onto a swelling crest of waving beach grass, higher than the shack itself. I wondered if the ridge fronting the beach had actually formed since the shack was built, thus blocking its original ocean view.

As I sat there speculating on the geological past of these dunes, I became witness to one of the great autumn spectacles of the dunes: the migration of tree swallows along the Cape’s outer shores. In mid-September they pour down from the north in vast, dense flocks, following their insect food supply south for the winter.  Now a tremendous storm cloud of several thousand birds seemed to materialize in the air, an electric hoard of small, iridescent birds swirling and shifting around the shack. Their blue-green heads and backs shone in the sun in various stages of molt, sending a fractured glare of color back to the eye.

After a few minutes several hundred birds land in the bayberry shrubbery on the south side of the shack. Of course, to say they “landed” is a misnomer – rather, the vortex of swallows lowered and touched down, like a feathered tornado - shifting, changing places, chittering like static electricity. They seem to have that unconscious introspection of colonial masses, aware only of one another and the intense conversation and interaction between them, so that when I got up moved towards the landed swallows to get a better view, I found I could get within seven or eight feet of the closest birds without starting the flock.

As I continue west and eventually come to the high dune overlooking Pilgrim Lake, two more large flocks, of perhaps a thousand or more swallows each soared back and forth over the valley to the north. They intersected, then parted, then intersected again.  I wondered, do the separate flocks actually exchange members during these momentary joinings?

Seen from a distance, these swallow flocks seemed more meteorological than organic. With grackles, and even starlings, one gets the sense that their flocks are always moving from one place to another, even if the purpose is not clear. There’s a deliberateness in their movements, whereas swallow flocks seem much more passive, much more cloud-like to watch. They seem to expand or contract like smoke or leaves blown in the wind. Scarves of  a hundred or so birds would spin off and then be lifted several hundred feet up into the sky, in a whirling spiral, only to descend again back into the mass. It was like watching a storm of birds, moved by an unseen engine of energy, under a hot clear late-summer sky. It had that coordinated chaos of storm clouds, or surf on a rocky shore, so that each part of it seemed both independently passive and yet connected by some larger, invisible force.

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.