Fly south with a flock of geese

  • Walk­ing the hound, my ear caught that sound that has become so famil­iar these months. At first, it sounds like a far­away chi­huahua bark­ing, then another, then a whole bunch of chi­huahuas. And then you real­ize the sound is all com­ing from above you.

    <a onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackPageview’, ‘/out/www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/animals/3487942-canadian-geese-with-sunset.php?id=3487942>div style=”text-align: center”><img id=’]);” href =“http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/animals/3487942-canadian-geese-with-sunset.php?id=3487942>div style=”text-align: center”>geese-at-sunset.jpg
    There were thou­sands of fly­ing chi­huahuas this after­noon, line upon line of them stretched out to the end of visibility.

    “How’d you like to fly south with a flock of geese in the after­noon?” That’s the line (or some­thing like it) from “Mir­a­cle on 34th Street,” my very favorite hol­i­day movie. In the scene where “Kris Kringle” is telling a young Natalie Wood why she should want to cul­ti­vate an imag­i­na­tion, that’s one of the images he con­jures up to get her think­ing. It still does the trick for me.

    Fly WITH the migrat­ing geese. Wouldn’t that be some­thing? What do they see? How does it look and sound and feel to fly hun­dreds of miles with the flock all around you?

    Think­ing about that as I watched and watched the snaking lines of Canada geese con­vinced me that my Sun­day after­noon peace­ful time had to include watch­ing “Winged Migra­tion.” This Oscar-winning 2001 doc­u­men­tary is sim­ply beau­ti­ful and bless­edly short on nar­ra­tion. It just puts you in the driver’s seat (so to speak) with many, many dif­fer­ent kinds of birds and geese migrat­ing all over the world. Here’s a sample:

    It was accom­plished by a vari­ety of means, but the best results come from the sequences (like the one above) where the crew flew in ultra­lights with a flock that had been raised to think of the cam­era­man as their mother — ‘imprint­ing’ on them (for those of you who remem­ber your Psych 101 vocabulary).

    I just men­tion all this because there are few movies that fill your senses and refresh your spirit every time you see them. This is one.


    Related posts:

    1. What is our daily bread?
    2. Give us this day
    3. Play­ing with daylilies
    4. Take a Canuck car­toon break
    5. Chef goes sour on “South Park”

    February 1st, 2009 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Tanya 02.01.2009

    wow. this is absolutely breathtaking.

  • Grace

    Isn’t it just? In case I’m not being obvi­ous enough, I think every­one in the world needs to own a copy. I saw it for the first time in a store that was just try­ing to show off the virtues of its plasma screen tech­nol­ogy, but I’ve watched it on all kinds of screens, and it’s always fabulous.

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