Goosed

There is a wonderful film out there called Winged Migration that I can recommend highly. If you have never seen it, perhaps your library has a copy to borrow, or you can rent it on Amazon for less than four bucks. It documents the truly amazing journeys of many species of birds around the world. The hardships they face, sometimes overcoming and sometimes … well … you have to see the film to appreciate them, I think.

One overarching theme is how long these epic flight paths have been in existence, and what changes have gone on in the world beneath their larger family over time. But the earth turns, the birds fly, and even if our own species eventually self-destructs, the migrations will go on and on. They are ancient, much more durable than humans and their dramas. What is obvious is that we rarely have a positive influence on the natural world. We are more of an insult.

But enough of this light-heartedness, let’s get serious for a moment. I don’t know if you can call it courage as we define it in our own lives, but these migrations seem courageous endeavors to me. If I could flap my arms and once travel even ten miles to a new location, I would be crowing about it for the rest of my life.

We have a tendency to denigrate the achievements of other species, our calculations somehow always making us come out at the top of the heap. It’s just instincts, we say, implying that these “lower” animals don’t put much thought into what they are doing. (Birdbrains, we call people who are missing a card or two in their deck.)

One of our problems in understanding other species is that we keep using our yardsticks to do the measuring. We prize problem-solving, so any creature that seems limited in that way is lesser. We are enamored of our houses, our tools, and our intellectual achievements. Never mind that our evolution to a “spiritual being” has resulted in widespread murder and injustices as our history reveals members of one group after another happily plotting the bloody demise of the other groups.

Nope, if I want to look for models of good behavior for a citizen of this planet, I have to look outside of our species. Take the greylag goose, for example. Both sexes care for the young, they travel in flocks where some members stay vigilant while others rest. They mate for life, which is something humans talk about but fail to do a great deal of the time. Up to 20 per cent of greylag geese are homosexual, which doesn’t seem to upset the other members of the flock one bit. And greylag geese have never ever committed genocide.

So I keep an open mind, because being called “silly as a goose” may not be such a bad thing after all.

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A tiger would smell us before we came into sight, spot us way before we could see it, and would be drooling at the finish line with a knife and fork in hand and a napkin tied neatly under its chin.

Add to this humbling scenario the fact that our young take more than a decade before they can fend for themselves and you wonder how we got this far as a species. If we hadn’t developed tools and weapons we would probably be no more than another case of scratchings on a Siberian cave wall that said Glorg Wuz Hear.

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It’s starting to get interesting (as in the curse: May you live uninteresting times). We may have a recession coming at us, which if it does, is clearly the work of only two men and their party. Usually recessions are a bit more nebulous in origin, but if this one arrives it will be the Truskcession for certain. Of course, if it weren’t for a spineless Republican party, they couldn’t mangle our economy the way they are doing. Have to give credit where credit is due.

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