I live in the Central Flyway, that magnificent migration route from the northern reaches of the Canadian wilderness to Central and South America.

At the turn of the 20th Century, Sandy Griswold, sports reporter for the Omaha World Herald wrote of the 1890s crane migration, “. . . they came down like gray and snowy avalanches from the far north in the blustery days of March.

In my grandmother’s childhood, the ducks and geese came in clouds that dimmed the sun, flapping and gabbling, lighting in meadows and cornfields, snapping up grubs and grain to fatten and prepare themselves for the serious business of breeding and producing a new generation of waterfowl to darken the sky.

In the Sandhills up north, the shorebirds came to the wet meadows, lakes formed when the water table extended above the surface of the sand; striding on stilted legs, they joined the ducks and geese in stirring up the water and consuming water bugs, water plants, and seeds.

Farther east, in the Mississippi Flyway, came the passenger pigeons that used to flow through the Great Lakes region at sixty miles per hour darkening the skies morning to night for several days running,  their flocks seeming to expand and contract like living lungs breathing.

Now they come in lonely skeins, their cries nearly unheard in the empty skies, and the pigeons don’t come at all.

Considered a superior eating duck, the canvasback succumbed to overhunting. Few remain in the flyway.