We talk a lot about the birds and the turtles migrating to this coast, but there's another migration here that's just as regular and a lot more fun to watch, and it's made of people. They call them the snowbirds.
Every fall, as the cold clamps down on Canada and the upper Midwest — Ontario, Michigan, Minnesota, the Dakotas — a great flock of Northern folks, mostly retired, pack up the car and drive south, hundreds and hundreds of miles, and land right here on the Alabama Gulf Coast for the winter. They come by the tens of thousands. They rent the condos and the cottages that sit empty after the summer crowds go home, and they settle in for three, four, five months, until spring calls them back north.
And they don't just hibernate. They build a whole seasonal society down here. There are snowbird clubs, snowbird breakfasts, dances and card games and potlucks, welcome rallies in the church halls, line-dancing on the beach. Whole friendships that only exist from November to March, picked up again the same week every year. Businesses down here plan their whole winter around them — early-bird suppers, singalongs, shuffleboard tournaments.
It makes a beautiful kind of sense. They're doing exactly what the ducks and the geese and the hummingbirds do — following the warmth, escaping the killing cold, riding an ancient instinct to a gentler shore. Only these migrants drive minivans and bring their grandkids' photos. So if you're rolling through in January and the beach seems full of cheerful folks in windbreakers with license plates from a thousand miles north — now you know. The snowbirds are in. Same as the pelicans, just with better card games.
Photo: Александр Байдуков · CC BY-SA 4.0
