The bird world’s second busiest superhighway charts a course over Israel’s West Bank. Every spring, 500 million birds representing 400 species migrate north from Africa to Europe. Every autumn they return the same way: nightjars and sparrows, owls and gulls, bee-eaters and flamingos, some birds forming “long vees of honking intent”, others riding as “sole travellers skimming low over the grass”, according to Colum McCann.
The sheer volume makes life extremely difficult for the Israeli Air Force. At times, the flocks are so numerous as to block out the sun. But what do the birds make of events on the ground? “Every year,” writes McCann, “a new landscape appears underneath: Israeli settlements, Palestinian apartment blocks, rooftop gardens, barracks, barriers, bypass roads”.
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