Departing Flight on Runway 10 a New Record?

Buff-breasted Sandpiper   September 3, 2011

I remember how perfect the morning began, with migratory birds feeding and descending with urgency from a long night’s flight.  My young birches were alive with darting, hopping, and hovering forms.  Many of these birds were tropical birds—warblers, vireos, and tanagers with more than a thousand miles remaining on the autumn journey.  Their fueling by day and flying by night is a heroic, romantic feat, and I have often wondered if birds inspired flight or if our own nomadic and migratory roots are so alike that we, too, were destined for flight. 

Chestnut-sided Warbler

Red-eyed Vireo

There is something unique and freeing about a small airplane experience. If you haven’t flown in a Cub, a Citabria, or a sail plane, you may be missing one of the most spectacular perspectives of our planet.  To be a bird, soaring up on thermals, rising just high enough above those mysteries of the forests hidden from terrestrial view, is to be aware, alive in the connections between blocks of woodland, lakes, rivers, low seeps and advantageous rises in the land.  Things make more sense when the blue sky wraps around you and the trees far below are a stunningly rich and luxurious green.  Waterways reflect blue sky or silver dappled sunlight and reveal their courses through the land, enriching ecosystems and touching lives as they pass along.  Turning your head over your shoulder, clearing your turn, banking a wing down low, and pulling the world around you joins you with the minds of hawks and eagles.    Stick and rudder flying turns a human soul into a bird.

Piper Super Cub towing L-23 Super Blanik to altitude

Western Wisconsin’s airports are unique habitats, short grass fields amid a mosaic of forested terrain.   From these small fields I have heard Western Meadowlarks, Horned Larks, Upland Sandpipers, and Grasshopper Sparrows, birds that speak of wide open, wild spaces.  Departing flights of small planes chart out exciting destinations.  A good friend of mine, Chris Prince, keeps his sail plane aloft for nearly seven hours, attempting flights averaging well over 250 miles, sometimes achieving all of this with a short, 1500-foot tow from a bright yellow Piper Cub.  He works the energy of the planet, uses rapidly rising air to thermal, much like a pelican, an albatross, a condor…  His accomplishments are spectacular in their use of the Earth’s abundant solar energy and their blending earth science with old fashion flying by feel.  His example should be an example for the captains of industry, a reminder that we don’t need to be wasteful, that we can power our world in a renewable fashion. 

Buff-breasted Sandpiper

While Chris may hold some pretty impressive cross-country records, other beings have surpassed him.  They are not flying better gliders or playing the winds better.  Indeed they are not human.  They are the birds that may well have inspired our flight and lead us on into the sky.  On September 3, I witnessed one of the longest departing flights from Osceola’s airfield.  The Buff-breasted Sandpipers, departing near Runway 10, were headed to Argentina.  Enough said.

Two Buff-breasted Sandpipers enroute to Argentina