One hand, held high, claps with a rapid, stiff, staccato wingbeat. Bud Anderson I. High in the spring bare cottonwood a merlin watches - intently. Bobs her head - fixing the distance to her prey, then lifts her wings and drops away. She is dark, streaked, flies flat and fast into the shadows of dairy barns, machinery sheds.
Pigeons explode into spring light, their wings clacking.
A racket of blackbirds, way up in black poplars, stops into silence. She misses, circles away over flooded pasture-lands beating her wings like applause. Just west of here a dike divides the pastures from the Sound, from the tide flats. The tide is high, the sun is low. Near birds stream north, the far birds south - in a slow whirling, spiral flight.