OR TWO YEARS I’ve lived in a river valley, and I suppose I’m likely to live here for twenty more, or at least I want to, for as long as the ancient rookery remains. The birds could have nested here for well over a hundred years. Each morning and evening, at the beginning and end—the period between midnight and earliest morning in both Spanish and Portuguese—perhaps a thousand or more birds croak and dance in half-light, mystical, ignored or unseen by most. It is silencing to watch—their unexplainable rhythms, the seemingly arbitrary but dramatic changes in altitude, and the way they decide in the split of a second to sink down into the trees and land, as if being vacuumed by the forest.
