A Monarch butterfly being tagged in Cape May, New Jersey last week.

WOULDN’T it be nice to fly away? Maybe to a mountain in Mexico where you could spend the upcoming Corona winter?

I envy the migrating species, the butterflies and the birds who travel hundreds of miles at this time of year. There they go — without fear, without masks, without passports, without even a car or plane. Just wings.

Two weeks ago, I heard a tapping on one of our car windows while I was working outside. A catbird had flown into the car. He was flinging himself against the rear window. He couldn’t figure how to get out the one open window. I got the keys and opened all the windows. He was thrilled, in his own way. He had no use for this vehicle at all.

He is probably gone now for the winter.

Flying at night while we are asleep, using the stars and the earth’s magnetic field for navigation, he will probably arrive any day now in Florida.

Last week, we saw Monarch butterflies at a bird-and-butterfly rest stop near the Atlantic Ocean in Cape May, New Jersey. The butterflies, looking for nectar in the shore vegetation, were on their way to a mountain in Mexico for the season. They weigh about 1/400th of an ounce — they are as light and flimsy as paper envelopes — and yet they survive winds at 1,000 feet or so above the ground to get to their destination. Many of them will arrive intact.

We also saw four bald eagles circling overhead, riding a warm thermal with their famous, dramatic wings held in place. They probably were migrating too and had traveled from farther north. They usually migrate in groups, spread about half a mile apart from each other, taking up as much as twenty to thirty miles altogether with their eagle caravans. They travel about 30 miles an hour, which isn’t bad, considering.

I can’t imagine what they are thinking when they look down at our highways except that they are glad to be eagles and not Jeep Wranglers and Ford Explorers.

The eagles and Monarchs are just as beautiful in person as they are in photos and on logos. They are celebrities of the airways. So beloved are the delicate, orange-and-black wings of the Monarchs and the majestic glare of the eagles that their numbers are meticulously tallied every year and armies of fans travel to see them.

In addition to eagles, we saw American Kestrels, Merlins and Sharp-shinned Hawks from a platform where bird watchers were aiming their binoculars like guns at the skies and calling out the names of the raptors they saw. Not all birds are worthy of being watched. The swans who have taken over a nearby pond are despised and nobody but the lowest of amateurs even looks at them.

A naturalist in a pavilion nearby had a Monarch in a little breathable envelope. She took it out, scraped off some of the velvety scales from one of its wings and affixed a small sticker with a tracking number, like putting a stamp on a letter. Did you know you can “adopt” a Monarch who is traveling south? He won’t know who you are, but you can know his number and if he arrives — and someone in Mexico catches him — you will be contacted and informed — phew! — that he has safely completed his journey. They say they are dwindling in numbers and so you may worry.

At night you can lie in your bed and think of your butterfly.

You can think of the eagles swooping down from their aeronautic highways to catch fish and the little catbirds who escaped from cars in time.

This burst of autumnal energy continues without interruption year after year. It’s never canceled due to bad weather or virus mania.

Even the smartest ornithologists with all their charts and high-tech scopes cannot fully understand it. How birds and butterflies manage to do it remains partly mysterious.

If the thought of all this flapping and soaring, gliding and whirling in the golden light of fall does not lift you up — metaphorically speaking, I mean — then probably nothing can.

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