There is much to love about spring in Wyoming, and I would like to suggest one more way to appreciate the natural beauty of our state.

On May 9 some 440,000 birds migrated across Carbon County. They traveled northeast at a speed of about 30 mph. We didn’t notice them because they were flying mainly between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. but also because they were flying at about 3,000 feet.

Even though I can’t see them, knowing an epic journey is unfolding above me instills a sense of wonder and awe I find comforting, given the tumult in the world right now.

Among the birds migrating north across Carbon County were Bullock’s orioles (just appeared last week!), yellow warblers, black headed grosbeaks and blue-winged teals. The American avocets showed up on May 2 when we had an epic 1,264,200 fly over. Mostly, we are seeing waterfowl, but the ruby-crowned kinglets and their cousins will show up any day now.

I know this because I follow a site called Birdcast. Designed by Cornell Labs, it tracks bird migrations across every county in the contiguous United States every spring and fall. Their website — birdcast.info — tells a great story about how they came to be able to make such predictions following the development of more and more sophisticated radar equipment and satellites.

At the end of the day, the system relies on normal people observing the lives of the birds around them and reporting what they see. Sometimes we don’t see birds so much as we hear them.

I know the grosbeaks are in Carbon County because I heard one on the grounds of the Wyoming Frontier Prison, though I never spotted it. I can’t identify anything other than the common birds in the neighborhood by sound, but another Cornell Labs program can.

The Merlin Bird ID app can be downloaded for free on your phone and has a recording function that can identify birds by their songs, chirps, cackles or other noises. I’ve used it across the U.S. and in Honduras. Yesterday, it picked the brown-headed catbird out of a cacophony of starlings, grackles and red-winged blackbirds (the latter of which seems to have an unusual presence in Rawlins this spring).

It has been well substantiated that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs. Scientific American has a short summary about how we know this, but it is increasingly likely that birds evolved from theropods: velociraptors, T. rexes and the like. So it turns out The Flintstones was a documentary! We still walk the planet while millions of dinosaurs fly overhead.

Somehow, that seems to put the absurdity of the moment, of any moment, into a new frame. And a new frame is always helpful.

So while you are enjoying spring as it splashes color across our landscape, look up and enjoy how your county plays a part in the flight of the dinosaurs, one of the greatest planetary migrations in the world. Just keep your mouth closed.

Dave Throgmorton, Ph.D., retired as Director of the Carbon County Higher Education Center in Rawlins and discovered, as do many of his contemporaries, that the backyard birdbath is a door to a new way to appreciate the outdoors.

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.