Taking the Boys to See the Birds

For the last few years I’ve been vaguely aware that there was some sort of birding phenomenon going on in Round Rock during the summer. I had heard that large groups of some bird could be seen gathering together before roosting and that it was worth seeing. But I didn’t look into any further.

Until this year. After a few brief internet searches I came across the Travis Audubon website. They identified the birds as Purple Martins and gave a bit more information about their behavior and how they, “begin roosting together by the thousands in early summer…in preparation for their migration to South America” for the winter.

The site also said you can see hundreds of thousands of the birds and they put on a, “spectacular aerial acrobatics show before landing in roost trees.” They also casually mentioned some people describe the phenomena as a hurricane of birds. Talk about burying the lede.

This certainly sounded like something that might be worth seeing so I took the four older boys in search of the birds. In years past and according to an outdated website the roosting site was in the parking lot of the Kohls and/or Hobby Lobby in La Frontera so that’s where the boys and I headed.

We arrived at 7:35 with the understanding that the birds would start returning to the roost from 8P-9P. As we sat on the tailgate of the truck and looked across the vast concrete expanse of the La Frontera parking lot, I realized something that convinced me mass amounts of birds were not congregating in this area.

I mentioned just that and one of the boys looks at the ground and said, “yeah, look, there’s no poop.” Bingo. A car pulled up and a friendly elderly couple asked us from the rolled down passenger window if we were looking for the birds.

I said we were but had never come before and suspected we weren’t in the right spot. They said they heard the birds were at Discount Tire instead of Kohls and were headed there. I said I didn’t know Discount Tire rotated Purple Martin tires.

After the couple drove off I looked up the Travis Audubon website on my phone and found the current site which showed that the birds were indeed at the Discount Tire. That was only a mile or so away so we loaded up and headed over.

There was a smattering of people with lawn chairs in the grassy area next to the parking lot facing the trees in front of Discount Tire so we figured we were in the right place. When the friendly couple we had seen in the Kohls parking lot pulled up and waved to us I felt even more confident we were where we wanted to be. When one of the boys looked at the parking lot ground and said, “look at all the bird poop!” I knew we were in the right place.

But you wouldn’t have known it by looking at the sky. It was approaching 8P and there were some birds passing over but it didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary. Most of the birds weren’t even Purple Martins (which by the way are not purple!). Around 8:30 I pointed out a small group of Purple Martins in the sky and said something to the effect that I thought things were going to start.

The 12-year-old dead panned, “woo-hoo, 27 birds.”

The subtle way the spectacle began made this comment seem funny because it was true. But 15 minutes later there was nothing subtle about it. People may have described it as a bird hurricane but what we experienced was a bird tornado.

More and more birds started gathering until you had no chance of counting them. They cut and glided and made fighter jet like passes and then started to swoop and swirl en masse all around us.

And the noise! It was a veritable cacophony of tweets and calls in the air. And there was another noise on the ground. The quiet pitter splatter of Purple Martin “rain.”

I said to the boys, “Oh I forgot to mention we should have brought umbrellas – close your mouth if you look up!” This was extremely good advice.

As it approached nine the birds consolidated into a tweeting storm cloud of flapping winds and began swirling around just a few trees in the front of the parking lot. We wanted to get a closer look so we went all the way up to within 30 or so feet of the roosting trees. The noise was incredible. Pictures, videos, and written descriptions don’t capture the astounding organized chaos of seeing this up close. If you go, get up close at the end.

After a few minutes we walked back to the truck. One of the boys said, “look at the sky!” It really was amazing to look up and see no birds at all after having seen the sky filled with tens of thousands of them.

As we drove home I thought about how wild it was that this Purple Martin show had been going on fifteen minutes from our house and we had no idea. It was even wilder to think you could have been half a mile away from the roost trees and had no idea that this spectacular show was going on every night.

Makes me wonder…what other miracles in nature are hiding in plain sight?