Birds!

Last night I stopped to monitor the water of the Rum River on the Pleasant Avenue bridge.  I park on the east side of the river and have to walk more than halfway across because, for some reason, the water on the west side flows strongly south while the water on the east side seems to flow north.  As I walked across the bridge I admired a good number of barn swallows swirling around.  Some kind of insect must be hatching this week on the river. I crossed the river on my motorcycle twice on Tuesday and both times I was glad to have a full face helmet.  There was a swarm of bugs above the river.  When I dropped my empty bucket over the side of the bridge and huge flock of barn swallows flew up and circled the sky in front of me.  I had to stop what I was doing to admire this barn swallows.  Or should I call them bridge swallows?  They were blue on top with white chests, some orange on their faces and forked tails.  Their flight seems synchronized.  No bird was too close to the next bird and they flew in uniform swirling patterns.  It could be the barn swallows made made their mud nests under this bridge and the sight of a red plastic bucket flying by disturbed them.  The birds seemed to settle back down and I got down to the business of collecting water, measuring the turbidity, the temperature and making subjective judgements about the beauty and recreational suitability.  I hate to linger too long on the bridge. I've had a handful of people I know say, "I saw you on the bridge last night, what were you doing?"  Once, when monitoring the river in the pouring rain I never heard the Anoka police officer stop his car, get out, approach me and say (with an overly dramatic amount of emphasis is his voice,) "What the hell are you doing?"  So I tried to hurry yet appreciate the flock of swallows dancing in the sky for my benefit.  I like birds so I enjoyed the spectacle. If I didn't like birds, the moment could have been like the Hitchcock move, "The Birds."