Sky dancers

Anyone who admires skillful piloting ought to come sit with me on a March day when the sky comes alive with cloud puffs and buzzards. These birds, I think, are most majestic of all flying machines.

Were aeronautical engineers half so clever as Mother Nature they might by now have designed a craft that can imitate these creatures who almost never have to flap, never have to strain, never do anything but manipulate the geometry of their wings and feathers. Just by doing that much they can fly into the wind or before it; at an angle to it, sideways, up and down. They can soar to many hundreds of feet, so high they become mere specks in the sky. They can slide along the tips of trees at an astounding rate, given a good tail wind; and they can settle through thick branches of the forest into a quiet landing.

I can forgive the buzzards for being gross in their dietary habits and for looking dangerous and disgusting up close. We all have our faults, even engineers. It was engineers who provided such a choppy little airplane with a noisy engine, chugging along my sky in a straight line, its noise killing serenity and solitude of the moment.

Its pilot was missing the real show, the one I watched from my sky-theater seat. He may have been experiencing joy in breaking with gravity, but he was a million light years from the joyful sky dancing of buzzards in spring.