Souls Tumbling in the Light
When it gets dark, New York City turns on 88 7,000-watt xenon light bulbs to produce two powerful beams that shoot up, side by side, to remind us that once upon a time, two towers stood here, and then didn’t, and this is how we remember the day they came down — by looking up.
They are beautiful, these beams. Fragile. Elegant. Heaven bound, but they have an unfortunate side effect. They attract migrating birds. The light pulls warblers and thrushes and orioles and tanagers off course, beckoning. And once they enter the columns, many of them stay, swirling round and round, apparently unable to leave.
Birds Billowing Upward
In 2002, writer Craig Childs and a friend were in lower Manhattan when the lights went on. In his book The Animal Dialogues, he writes that as they walked closer, “we realized the lights were filled with movement. Countless birds raced in and out, bright, meteoric paths cutting the sky. … Never had I seen such a gathering, plumes of birds billowing upward, multiplying upon themselves until they appeared infinite, as thick as Milky Way stars.”