Windswept notes

Imagine this view from space – delicate gray-scale lace swirling around a blue planet, swept by winds and powered within by an ingrained habit to move in order to survive, to persist. It was like your cursor assuming some magical little bird and leaving a trail when you swirl it around a blue spherical "screen." This is what it seemed to me viewing bird migration from space when I recently saw a movie called Winged Migration, a film by Jacques Perrin, a no-special-effects release by Sony Pictures. (You can learn more about it if you go to www.sonyclassics.com/wingedmigration/index_flash.html). It was a movie that took four years in the making with the crew following migrating birds around the world, species by species, season after season, and continent after continent.

As a science and nature observer, I was interested in the experience of being as close to a "bird’s eye view" of the world as possible. And this I cannot do even in the best company of pedigreed bird watchers, not in the scale that Winged Migration has reached. The camera lenses traveled with the birds – the very lenses with which humans through their science, technology and art, extended and expressed their joy and desire to understand or simply soak in the experience of flight with among the best flyers of them all. It was an invitation to flight, and as such, an offer I could not refuse. "Airborne," these were my notes:

First, the magnitude. Birds fly across deserts, mountains and ice for thousands of miles. The elders show their young how to do it across vast continents and landscapes, and in the process, the young learn to memorize landmarks and would be able to pass this on to their own young. One could easily find an analogy with humans when they teach their young to "walk" a certain path of earth across distances through the lifetimes they share. Imagine though if each human elder were given the equivalent chance to share the world to young ones like migrating birds do. Imagine what the child would realize and feel if soon enough, she/he learns from her/his elders that though her/his tiny legs could only walk a piece of earth now, there were others before her/him who have, in limb and mind, captured the wonder and reality that indeed the world is vast and that in certain seasons, and endowed with a certain kind of gift (and in some cases, ships and modern-day research grants), large pieces of the Earth lend themselves to understanding and treading by his fellow human beings.

Second was the sense of timing and direction. The birds always knew when to go, how and where. Persistent bad weather was always a good indicator that the seasons were changing. They set off in flocks guided by each other and innately by a part of their brain that is sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field so that they always knew where they were headed. Of course, individual birds undertake great risks doing this too but they instinctively do it to ensure the survival not of the individual birds but of the species. I sometimes wonder whether this sense, i.e., of timing and direction, is what humans have been so frail at cultivating. We, as a species, seem to be multiplying and moving too fast in sort of vague directions, causing often disastrous consequences to fellow species and ourselves and to other creatures in the world. We may not have brain parts as keenly sensitive as a compass needle to the Earth’s magnetic field but we do have other brain parts capable of comprehending the scale of our own actions and their effects but we still seem very confused and lazy to even try. You see I figured if we were pretty confident of our general evolutionary direction as a species, why do we keep asking ourselves: Where are we going? Or Are we there yet? I have often wondered at what people really meant when they say "there" in terms of evolutionary direction.

Third are dead-ends. The birds flew across the Great Wall of China and did not stop and roar while beating their chests, so to speak. No great invasion plan was foiled from a view from the clouds unlike the Mongols whose further plans literally ran smack against a wall. The Great Wall did not make sense to movement occurring in the skies. I realized that while the birds have for 80 million years, been flying and moving across the Earth, we, as a species, at different times in human history, have consistently come up with all sorts of divides to discriminate each other from ourselves and from the rest of creation. Science, with its own contributions, helped make us realize how mindless most of these divides were. There is no biological basis for race. We evolved from apes and thus, are part of an entire history of natural life and no poignancy and beauty are taken away just because our biological ancestors were once comfortable living in trees. We have thousands of people victimized by environmental tragedies as well as other large-scale economic and political tragedies, and instead of affirming that the world is fluid, we think up clever sorts of new divides to keep them out of our piece of the Earth.

But I have to admit, one scene made the more lasting and profound impression on me: a flock of birds flying over a piece of turquoise sky just at that moment that the dome that a huge telescope housed was slowly opening and the telescope is pointed toward the heavens (like the ones in the movie "Contact"). If I were the research scientist there, I would probably be yawning, greeting the morning and as usual peering through the telescope to investigate a corner in the heavens. However, for a fleeting moment, my view would be mediated by an earthly habit and form born by the migrating birds passing my lens’ view. It would resonate with my own sense of planetary identity and then, I will perhaps adjust my telescope lens and with the help of science, wonder and imagination, embark on my own take on a human’s winged migration into the heavens.