Kettles

A video entry. Click on the play button to play!

As we leave the summer days of recreation behind, I pause to remember how I closely I watched from early spring onward the re-creational season of one Connecticut osprey family courtesty of a web cam (http://www.ctaudubon.org/). How delightful it was to watch their 4 eggs hatch into 4 chicks. How amazing to watch the devotion of the parents to each other and these chicks which resulted in the successful fledging of all four young osprey ladies! In Maine As the days of August waned I watched, in person, ospreys doing what young ospreys everywhere do. They learned to catch thermals of hot air and ride them to the heights. They learned to glide back down to catch their own fish. They were practicing for their first trip to South America, a place they have never been before. Now that the days are quickly shortening the osprey and other hawks are using these thermals and gliding techniques to move themselves down the coast with the least amount of effort in amazing times. How do they know where to go and when? The young will spend the next year in Central or South America and return to their birth places up here in a year and a half. The parents will return to the nest and each other next spring to begin the process all over again. The place of their birth has been indelibly imprinted in their mind body connection.

I watched 3 Maine osprey chicks practicing their thermals over and over again in August.
Now all the osprey nests are empty. The mothers headed south first. Then the dads left after the last chick was able to fish for itself. A great and powerful migration is underway, birds soaring up the thermals to the great rivers of wind in the sky! “If you see more than five birds riding a thermal, its called a kettle. Some kettles hold several thousands.” (New England Nature Watch by Tom Long, September) Meanwhile the human migration from our summer grounds to our winter gathering places is upon us. What draws us together? Where are we led?

Would that we could learn to ride the thermals of the Holy Spirit and glide on the great rivers of Spirit, rather than expending useless energy on bucking the winds that would guide us. That would be a fine kettle!