A Bike Ride that's for the Birds

The MacGuffin.  It is a Hollywood term first coined many believe by the legendary director Alfred Hitchcock.  Many suspense, mystery, and action movies have a MacGuffin.  The MacGuffin is the object or device that moves the movie and its main character along.  The missing “secret plans,” the “secret formula” in the hands of a mad scientist and so on.  Hitchcock liked to take ordinary everyday things and make them MacGuffins.  In 1963 he took standard backyard birds and unleashed them on a terrified society in the small town of Bodega Bay, California.  The motion picture was aptly named “The Birds” and it is a classic scary movie.  

In the cold weather months here in the northern hemisphere we see huge flocks of birds each evening.  They come out at dusk and set against the gray retreating sky the image of Hitchcock’s thriller comes to mind.  The bike rider, racing not against the clock but the setting sun, pedals hard under the wings of the menacing cloud created by these hordes of birds.

They are most likely red-winged blackbirds.  Sometimes the flocks are made up of starlings, grackles and cowbirds.  They form and fly in such tight unison for safety.  It is true: birds of a feather flock together.   The flocks have birds numbering in the thousands, sometimes the millions.  Not too long ago an estimate was made of 15 million birds living in one winter roost in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia.  Huge flocks are common in most suburban areas.   

They can be a nuisance.  In Colorado entire fields of sunflowers have been picked clean in a single day.  In New Mexico they wreak havoc on pecan crops.  In California they disrupt the almond harvest.  Wildlife officials at both the state and federal level have attempted to disrupt and scare off large flocks by dropping a wetting agent into their roosting trees.  As a result many birds were killed and the dead carcasses created bigger problems.

The huge flocking method is also a way to save energy.  It has been noted that Canada Geese save 50% of their energy by flying together in their V-pattern.  With the blackbird swarms it is possible that the birds in the middle may do very little actual flying, they are simply carried along thus saving nearly 100% of their energy.  

The birds create on a nightly basis a raucous dance of shrieks and movement.  On a bike ride you are alone in their element, in the wonder of nature.  And this is why we ride.  To be a solitary figure alone in the wild--even if it is suburban America.

Visit our website www.stickybottleteam.net.  We have posted “The Birds” movie trailer under VIDEOS.  It is in HD and the suspense is classic Hitchcock.