Birds of a feather
March 11, 2021
A curved-bill thrasher is perched atop an ocotillo. She is a lyricist with a large vocabulary. The Inca doves don’t like her. She talks too much. Three of them fly off to a nearby cholla. Loud and obnoxious, they say under their breath. Inca doves are cliquey, unlike the thrasher who operates solo. It’s a mild sunny morning in the Catalina Foothills. Soon the thrasher will hop along the ground, turning over small rocks with her nifty beak. But before she gets a chance there’s a huge rumble in the sky. Four F-16s rip through the air, flying in formation. They’re headed west from Davis-Monthan AFB south of Tucson. It’s the 214th Attack Group on a tactical exercise. Boy, these guys are fast: twice the speed of sound. Expensive too. I’m looking at $120 million tearing up the terrifically blue sky. The roar is vaguely thrilling, as if I were a kid again. But I’m an adult so I’m wondering how much this costs. Not cheap. The F-16 has an operating cost of $8,000 per hour. That’s a $32K operation roaring overhead on its way to California, if the pilots don’t fool around up there, like buzzing some Highway Patrolman in a California desert suburb before returning back. His radar gun will go bananas and he’ll whip out his iPhone to capture the low-altitude flyby.
The thrasher is indifferent to the mechanical birds whizzing overhead. The cost of her flight is two stink bugs. But she doesn’t come cheap. Her feathered body is optimized for flight, and her keen brain, pound for pound, makes her one of the most intelligent organisms on the planet. Her small body size and enormous smarts—not to mention that magnificent beak—were the culmination of evolutionary dynamics costing more than 50 million years. So I read. The odd thing about birds is that the earliest ones looked like dinosaurs, with arms and teeth. Kind of funny, as long as you keep Velociraptors out of the picture. By the time of 5th mass extinction, birds looked a lot different, had wings, beaks, and a keeled sternum for enormous flight muscles. Time well spent, considering that the thrasher’s ancestors survived the kaboom of the giant asteroid that killed off Dinosaurs and forests. 70% of all life disappeared. That’s massive! But birds with beaks, they lived on to tell their story. That’s what I imagine the curved-bill thrasher is singing, a survival tale.
When the F-16s return to Davis-Monthan, they will fly directly over the largest aircraft boneyard on the planet. A graveyard for military aircraft. That’s got to be a little spooky, from the jet’s point of view, anyway. Over 5000 decommissioned planes are stored here in the desert, some preserved, others cannibalized, spread out over 2600 acres. The legendary Enola Gay began its afterlife here. Like Roman ruins, the once formidable planes are a shell of their former selves, their sawed-off fuselages lying sadly in the dust. What used to be terrifying has somehow become poignant, as if a great epoch had ended. I suppose we can find cathartic relief in the mummification of a Titan II missile, but who knows.
The F-16 (or “Fighting Falcon”) is over 50 years old, which exceeds the average age of Air Force jets by 24 years. The clock may be running out on these birds. But maybe not. The Air Force still keeps 60 B-52 long-range bombers on call. That plane is a storied bomber. Not only did it star in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, but plenty of weird stuff occurred in the 1960s when the Air Force ran a program that kept a dozen nuclear-armed B-52s airborne 24 hours a day. SAC was out of it mind. 48 state-of-the-art nukes circling the globe 24/7. Accidents were inevitable, as when a B-52 lost a wing during a rocky mid-air refueling and dropped 3 of its nukes off the coast of Spain. Another B-52 caught fire over Greenland and crash-landed on a sheet of ice. In each case, rescue squads went nuts searching for nukes at the bottom of the sea. Miraculously, not one bomb ever went off. Kind of lucky if you ask me.
The Cold War—those were the days. So easy back then to organize your terror.