Seeing Ourselves Through Birds
Anybody regularly reading this blog has probably noticed that I sometimes take a
rather odd route from the ideas or images in a New Morning show to the
experiences of my day. So be warned: how I got from the show on "
How We See
Ourselves" to this post is not very obvious!
To begin, just before I
tuned in the program, I was sitting at my computer watching a webcam trained on
a pair of
Peregrine Falcons in San José, California. This pair, named
Clara and José, have three babies (called eyases) who are growing by leaps and
bounds. Last week they were just bobbing heads that poor Mom had trouble
feeding; now they are practically pursuing her around the nest box.
I
was delighted, then, when I turned on the TV and the first segment on
New
Morning was about birds. I didn't know there's a park in New York City where
Chinese immigrants take their birds for a day of singing in
the fresh air. I may just have to go down there and hang out with them for a
while. (The webcam does not have sound.)
There's a listserv for
people watching the falcons, and I enjoy reading it for all the information
about these birds' habits. But mostly I find it fascinating to see how much we
humans project our qualities upon the falcons.
The posters on the list
admit as much, with such comments as (and I'm paraphrasing here) "I know I'm
anthropomorphizing, but isn't José just the best dad the way he sticks around
the nest and cleans up after the kids?"
Or "Did you see that look José
and Clara just gave each other as if to say 'What are we going to do with these
kids?' " The birds are described as "clever" and "affectionate." There's lots of
talk about how the family is bonding.
So here's how I connect this to
today's New Morning theme on "how we see ourselves." It is always instructive to
notice what qualities—both positive and negative—we notice in others.
You know the old saying, "If you spot it, you've got it." Could it be
that we on the falcon listserv are noticing in the birds what we really see in
ourselves?