I’d heard about Birdcast before, the Cornell Lab’s forecast of bird migration activity, but last night I was reminded of it when reading Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald.

Macdonald parks herself atop the Empire State Building with a Cornell Labs expert and a fine pair of binoculars and watches as three black-crowned night herons fly 300 feet above the 1,250-foot observation deck.

“I feel less like a naturalist here and more like an amateur astronomer waiting for a meteor shower,” Macdonald writes. As she became accustomed to focusing her binoculars on the ether, birds that would have been invisible to the naked eye flew into view. “For every larger bird I see, thirty or more songbirds pass over. … They resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire.”

Macdonald’s expedition was in early May, during a prime migration period. But reading about it reminds me of all that I miss, everyday.

“Up here we’ll be able to see only a fraction of what is moving past us: even the tallest buildings dip into only the shallows of the sky,” Macdonald writes. Only the shallows, yet high enough to glimpse beyond them.