While we humans are pinned down by gravity, there’s an overnight flow of birds hundreds and thousands of feet overhead using sound as their invisible traffic control system.
If you think about it, just really think about it, it might be enough to help shift your paradigm.
Consider this: In August, Andrew Whitacre used a bucket, painter’s tape, a waterproof microphone, and specialized software to detect and identify birds flying over the Merrill Lake Sanctuary in Springs at night.
Mr. Whitacre, a summer resident of Springs, was following in the footsteps of Bill Evans, a man who has been studying the nocturnal flight calls, or N.F.C.s, of birds since the 1980s.
Mr. Evan’s website, oldbird.org, explains: “Many species give short vocalizations as they fly, presumably for contact with other migrating birds, to work out flight spacing to avoid midair collisions, and for echolocation. Thousands of calls a night can be heard in some locations. Much of this migration is well above the average altitude of the terrain and not easily heard by ear, but a microphone can be built or purchased to help tune in and amplify flight calls of migrating birds.”
A link from his website leads to “Big Migration Night,” a six-hour recording from a remote upstate hayfield. Its twittering, quivering, insect-like churr feels elemental, like a building block of sound itself. (If you’re more into mammals, check the 26-minute mark for some howling coyotes.)
“Do you have muck boots?” asked Mr. Whitacre before trudging into acres of yellow marsh with a reporter.
Mr. Whitacre showed his white bucket, held up like a house on stilts by four lengths of wood that resembled yardsticks. Inside, a palm-sized green square, a $100 AudioMoth microphone.
He picked it up. “This has been out here for five days. Migration starts getting really active just after sunset.” (He records each night from 8 p.m. until 7 a.m.)
He removed a card, later plugged into a laptop and analyzed by a software program named Nighthawk. It produces grayscale images of the bird calls, maps of their pitch and volume, known as spectrograms.
To the uninitiated, they look like old-fashioned television static.
However, and in the gray chaos, dark squiggles appear. These represent sounds, lasting perhaps only a 20th of a print for Nighthawk.
After the software analyzed his recording, he was able to file an eBird report of 26 species flying over the marsh during the prior night.
His data have produced some surprises.
For example, in August, he reported over 100 American redstarts over the marsh. During a late summer day, you’d be lucky to see one.
“I don’t know their typical nightly distance,” he said, “but they could be doing Connecticut through here and along some of the South Shore in one night. I’m curious why they come through here rather than turn west at the North Fork.”
A scientifically useful observation might be his recording of a mourning warbler. They nest in the Northeast and the Maritimes, but little is known about their migratory paths south.
“I’m not intrigued as much by the rare species as the rare numbers,” he said. “The redstart numbers are exciting to me. If more people did this on the East End” — no one does this east of Nassau County — “I think it would fill in gaps for Northeast migration. I suspect the East End is an important navigational point for long-distance Atlantic coast migrants, but without skyscrapers to crash into, it’s tough to know without N.F.C.s.”
It’s not forest bathing, but this screenbased manner of birding might bridge the gap between computer types and tree huggers.
Besides, there’s the walk to the bucket.
Wheeling groups of barn swallows, a blue sky dripping with osprey calls, and a black cloud of first-year starlings moving as one, surrounded us through the blowing grass. With each step, our feet would get sucked a few inches into the marsh mud.
In a shallow pool of water, a motionless blue-claw crab.
“I forget what the original motivation was to come for a walk here,” Mr. Whitacre said, “but this is where I saw purple martens for the first time. I went back and told a co-worker, a birder, and he told me about their nesting habits. That got me hooked on behavioral stuff.”
Once you become used to hearing the recorded calls, he said, you start to notice them at night.
They lead to questions and maybe some answers. In the space between, there’s wonder. That works too.
Enthusiasts hope the hobby catches on. In one interview with PBS, Mr. Evans imagined an “audio net” covering the United States.
The birds will be up there tonight, flying over the green and blue squares of the Hamptons into the shapeless black, and eventually tropical warmth.
Let their presence comfort you if you wake in the middle of the night worrying about everything. Whether or not you can see it, there’s magic in the air.