Audrey Villines was dressed for the weather — and the birds.
The retired systems analyst for electricity giant Dominion was wearing sandals, shorts and a sleeveless top, attire appropriate to a steamy August night in Richmond. Villines also donned an Old Dominion University baseball cap.
"It's dual purpose," she said of her cover.
It was a wise choice and not just because there was a chance of rain. Something else could fall from the sky.
The purple martins were coming, an estimated 25,000 in their daily just-around-dusk descent on a stand of Bradford pear trees on the north edge of the 17th Street Farmers' Market in Shockoe Bottom. What started as a July-August ornithological phenomenon has become a street party, the Gone to the Birds Festival, now in its fourth year.
The Bottom might seem an incongruous setting for bird-watching on such a titanic scale. Freight and passenger trains rumble past neighboring Main Street Station. Cars and trucks whistle along Interstate 95. Diners and night-clubbers shuffle through the Bottom's cobblestone streets.
"It's incredibly exciting to see an urban location that birds can use so effectively," said Sara Morris, a Richmond native and professional ornithologist visiting her hometown from Buffalo, N.Y. "It's an amazing opportunity for the birds to have an area with limited predation — a safe area for them."
But Morris, a college professor and secretary of the American Ornithological Union, wasn't in the Bottom in a professional capacity. Throwing one arm around her father and the other around her little girl, Morris beamed: "I'm here as an official mom and an official daughter."
Shortly before 7 p.m., clouds of purple martins began circling hundreds of feet above the Farmers' Market. Over the next hour, the flocks grew. About 8:20, the birds began forming in tight clusters that dropped from the sky in a Mobius Strip-like pattern before alighting with a whoosh in the Bradford pears. A second wave landed about two minutes later.
"It's better than fireworks — they're live," said Lori Brennan of Henrico County, who, with her husband, Tim, traveled downtown for the feathery finale that drew about 1,000 people. Tim Brennan, like his wife a transplant from suburban Cincinnati, said, "And it's free — and we like to take advantage of what's free."
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