Twitchers and Murder

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.
​

-- Paul James McCartney

I grew up surrounded by Red-winged Blackbirds that would flock over tilled fields each spring and then returned to bent, barren corn stalks in the fall. Their endless songs, echoing across farmland in the gloaming, would carry me off to sleep and just as often wake me in the morning.

It’s early April. The spring migration is in full force. Birds course along the edge of Lake Michigan, heading north. The call of Red-winged Blackbirds again fills my mornings with dewy memories and delight. It is a bird watcher’s heaven.

It is also incredibly appropriate, since I am penning my fourth cozy mystery, The Nighthawk’s Nemesis. The story is woven around bird watchers—twitchers, as they are called in the UK. As usual, I’m knee deep in research as I begin a new novel. I am studying ornithology, birder’s slang, and the stunning migration along England’s coast. It is made all the more fascinating by the actual spring migration that hovers over my own head in Wisconsin.

In that recent research, I have learned that a group of chickens is a peep, a group of owls is a parliament, a group of larks is an exaltation, and a group of blackbirds…a murder. How terribly appropriate.

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