Attribution: Photo by Chris Briggs on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes that while the keeper and Phyllis and their flightless crowd slept through last night, 25.2 million birds were in flight up in the night sky on their way to summer family- rearing haunts as far away as the arctic tundra.
That is a truly amazing circumstance that evolved over the ages as humans were evolving to walk upright and do their flying in big metal things that require long runways and an army of technicians and regulators.
The birds and the flying people obviously share some of the basic elements of flight, among them take offs and landings, and the keeper marvels at the balcony sparrows as they deal with identifying a landing site, reducing power to slow down and finally stopping safely on something solid.
This, of course, is all done with such casual “flitting” as to be the envy of veteran airline captains using the very same elemental landing requirements.
Now as the incredible facts of bird migration remind the arrogant human’s that when it comes to the evolution of flight they have not been the chosen ones and there is always the possibility of their flight being late, over-booked, diverted or cancelled.
It may be an evolutionary trade-off that the awkwardly-flying humans were dealt the capacity to build a bomb big enough to blow up the planet and send everything and everybody flying off into space.
Happy landing!
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