METHUEN - There are many places you may not want to be at 6 a.m. on a mid-autumn day, and the Grackleroost is probably one of them.
Unless you love birds.
No, not colorful parrots or tweety-sweet songbirds, awesome raptors, or some endangered species. We're talking the common grackle - a plainly plumed creature whose large flocks and signature squawking is as sure a sign of autumn as falling leaves. For reasons fully understood only by grackles, extraordinary numbers of these ordinary birds flock to an industrial backwater in Methuen in late October and early November before heading south for the winter.
The Massachusetts Audubon Society calls this gathering place Peat Meadow, but the phenomenon has earned the site near Interstate 93 the unofficial name of Grackleroost and the official designation of an Important Bird Area - an internationally recognized distinction shared with such Bay State ecological treasures as Chatham's Monomoy Island and the Cape Cod National Seashore.
For two years, birders from the Audubon Society's Joppa Flats headquarters in Newburyport have been taking early-morning field trips to see what has been described as upward of a million birds roosting in this most unexpected of places.
"Just the title of this program, 'A Million Birds' - that was enough to get me out here," said Jeannea Paine of Westford, who joined a recent trek to the site. "It was fantastic to see."
Various manufacturing plants and accompanying parking lots border this roost - essentially a soggy expanse of common reed, cattails, and purple loosestrife ringed by a low-lying scrub of small trees and brush. The roar of I-93 competes with the drone of refrigeration trucks idling endlessly at a nearby tractor-trailer depot.
The area is about as unremarkable as the birds that stop there. Dave Larson, the education coordinator at the Joppa Flats center, headed out with a group recently on a Sunday morning.
The group followed him through a warren of tightly parked tractor-trailers to a precarious footing atop an overgrown mound of dirt.
There they stared for 45 minutes through binoculars into the lifting darkness for signs that the roost was stirring.
Those who have seen the spectacle before described the skies as blackened with birds and the crescendo of their calls drowning out the noises from the highway and truck depot.
"This is not the most pristine place in the world, so why the heck would so many grackles pick it?" Larson said. "Probably because it's pretty safe here. There's lots of brush, and there is safety in numbers."
No one seems to know for sure when the birds first started to congregate there.
The birds spend most of the year north of central New England and the southern Great Lakes, and they head as far south as Florida in late fall, then return in the early spring.
In the fall, they can be seen feeding in large flocks, and in the evening they rest in even larger congregations - of which the Grackleroost is an extreme example.
"This is a very large concentration of birds," he said, "even if it is a common bird."
