By James Knudsen
This month's column ventures, yet again, into areas I am not qualified to comment on. Perhaps I should consider politics.
A good biologist is always wary of anthropomorphizing, attributing human characteristics, emotions, thoughts, musical tastes, onto members of the animal kingdom. Anyone who has owned a pet understands this tendency. Anyone who owns a cat – your cat is felinepomorhizing.
Thirteen years ago, I was waiting for a plane. According to my ticket, I wasn't leaving for a few days, so I was spending my final days in Asia seeing the sights of Bangkok that I'd missed a few weeks earlier. My accommodations were a room in a guest house near the Chao Phraya River. I'd opted for the cheaper, fan room with shared bath this time. and the upshot was that I had a balcony from which I had a partial view of the river some distance away.
One evening, at dusk, still plenty of light, it was what was going on at eye-level that caught my attention. I was observing the aerial displays of two very different hunters, going about their business in two very different ways. The first to catch my eye was a bird of the swallow family. The range of swallows is worldwide with the exception of Antarctica, and Californians know them from their famous home in Capistrano as well as their less-known home on the overpasses of Interstate 5 in the San Joaquin Valley. Still, Thailand was the first time I had spent time observing them pursuing their prey. It quickly became clear why the first operational jet fighter, the Messerschmitt Me-262, was named the Swallow. High-speed passes were the forte of that bird of prey, and the same was true of these feathered interceptors arcing past my room. Gently curving swoops, punctuated by quick, slight adjustments, a kick of rudder, a flick of aileron here and there to make the kill, marked the flight of these passerine pursuers.
At some point I realized that a second type of hunter was present, and its method of obtaining food was as ungainly as the swallow’s was graceful. It was bats. Bats are closer to us humans by virtue of their hair and seven cervical vertebra, but as I watched from my balcony, they seemed more distant from me than their graceful avian rival. Just the process of maintaining flight required a constant thrashing of their floppy wings. And when an insect was in striking distance, the haphazard became chaotic. If the swallow was the Me-262, the bat was the Sopwith Camel.1 The Camel, of Great War and Peanuts fame, was by all accounts the twitchiest fighter of its day. A powerful rotary engine, generating large amounts of clockwise, centrifugal force, combined with a concentration of mass, created a fighter-plane of extraordinary, and often deadly, maneuverability. Pilots remarked that when they wanted to turn left they would instead make a 270-degree right-turn, it just seemed quicker. Its mammalian counterpart in the skies above Bangkok displayed a similar twitchiness, contorting in such a spasmodic manner as to almost cease forward progress as it snared insects from mid-air and then resumed its steady, thrashing flight in the warm evening skies.
Comparing flying insectivores to death machines of the First and Second World Wars is benign enough, but recently I began thinking about another flying creature that has been maligned through the ages and wondering why this is. I've been pondering the crow and its Corvus relatives the raven, or corbie, and jackdaw.
...The raven himself is hoarseIf a crow is nearby, it's not a good sign.2 But why?
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements...
A while back I observed a small group of crows flying across the sky. For the first time, I noted the motion of their wings and how it seemed…ominous. The flap of the wings steady, but not fast. They don't flit about like smaller birds, they don't soar like hawks and eagles. They flap, flap, flap, shoulders kinda hunched in a way that tells you, if they're not looking for trouble, they're bringing it.
Now there's anthropomorphizing of the highest order. Crows don't have ominous thoughts or actions, they're just crows, omnivorous certainly, but ominous, no. Put them on the ground and they become quite different creatures. Their walk is at times comical and their ingenious ways of solving problems are endearing. But that way of flying, that flap, flap, flap. If a crow were an airplane it would be a bomber, and that never ends well.
Author's notes: After being lauded for always meeting deadlines earlier this month, I took a bit longer for today’s column. Birds have been an interest of mine for some time, but I am not a birder, wrong binoculars.
- The Sopwith Camel got its nickname from the metal fairing that enclosed the twin-Vickers machine guns and created a “hump” in front of the pilot. In addition to being the favorite mount of many British aces, it was also the plane in which Snoopy fought his pitched battles with the Red Baron.
- The crow's standing among Eastern cultures is not so dastardly. In addition to tending to anthropomorphize, I'm also Euro-centric.
| Copyright © 2015 by James Knudsen |
Nice. Maybe you can do a story on owls? Love your words
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