The war in my lower GI tract continues. I am trying to get an appointment with my doctor, Lady Sawbones, but unfortunately, because I’m breathing constantly, I don’t rate a very high priority at the moment. We’ll see what develops. Meanwhile, I’ll continue the chemical weapons attacks until morale improves.
This weekend, I was giving my big macaw, Sammy, some attention. There’s a game we play sometimes, called “eagle” … I’ll hold him high on my arm and say, “Eagle Bird! Eagle Bird!” Sammy then raises his wings and spreads them big and wide, like the eagle on the back of a quarter. He loves to do this … I always give him lots of praise and reward him. This time, as I was telling him what a good bird he was, he reached out with his beak, grabbed one of his primary flight feathers, yanked it out, and presented it to me!
I’m not quite sure what to make of that. Probably the feather was loose, and he noticed that as he was flapping his wings around. Just from looking at it I can tell it was an old feather and ready to come out. It’s just odd that he decided to pull it at that moment, and “hand” it to me. I didn’t make a really big deal about the “gift” for fear that he’d start yanking out more of them!
On an impulse, I brought the feather to work with me today, mainly to have a little reminder of Sammy in my office. I was looking at it a few minutes ago, and it struck me what an amazing structure it is. It’s a primary flight feather, which are the longest feathers on the wing of a bird. It’s made in an ingenious, asymmetric way. Like an airplane wing, the main “spar” (the feather shaft) is closer to the leading edge, so that it takes the load correctly in flight. The barbs that make up the leading edge of the feather are short and run at very acute angles to the shaft, so they’ll lay properly as they get the incident wind, while the barbs on the trailing edge are longer, thinner, and more flexible. The shaft curves gracefully from root to tip, and the vanes are cambered like the wing itself. The barbs that make up the vane of the feather are designed to “zip” together, sort of like velcro, so that air can’t pass through … if they get unzipped, a pass of the beak down the shaft of the feather zips them all up again!
I guess the reason I’m so impressed with Sammy, and our other birds, is that they represent nature at its finest. Man has spent more than a century trying desperately to do what these wonderful creatures do instinctively, without a thought.
Richard Bach once wrote, “Man is not bound to walk the earth and be subject to its codes. Man is a free creature, with domain over his surroundings, over the proud earth that was his master for so long.” He is right, but only just. If I want to go fly, I need a big metal airplane that drips oil and smells of avgas. I have to climb into it, start a big noisy engine, putter out to the runway, and by benefit of my hundreds of hours of training, haul it into the air. I can then fly around a bit, with nothing approaching Sammy’s grace and freedom, constantly bothering myself with technical details like whether my airspeed is fast enough, whether I’m at the proper altitude, and (if I have passengers) whether I know what the hell I’m doing. Eventually either my fuel or my luck runs out. In the case of the former, I can go find the runway, slam the plane rudely back down onto the tarmac and go park it in its puddle of oil, earthbound again. It’s all so … mechanical.
Sammy doesn’t think about airspeed, or angle of attack, or bank angles, or rates of climb or descent, he just goes, leaving the technical details of flight to be resolved by millions of years of innate instincts passed down from macaw to macaw. He doesn’t need a runway, any tree branch will do, and he can park himself on it with precision, making a perfect full-stall landing every time. Even though he seldom gets many opportunities to fly, he spends hours every day maintaining his feathers, stretching, and exercising, keeping the flying machine in tip-top condition. He is nature’s ultimate achievement, pilot and airplane made one. God, I envy him sometimes. Flap, yap, nap, and crap … it sounds like a pretty simple life, and I think I’d trade my big mammalian brain for that any day of the week. I wouldn’t even have to give up my opposable thumb! Hookbills like Sammy have four toes on each foot: two forward, two aft, fully opposable. Landing gear and hands combined. Brilliant!
They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I wonder what Sammy thinks? I’ll bet he knows he has the better lot in life, and would rather be a bird than anything else.