Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [112]
This is a bit of a thorny issue, this business of a bird's playfulness. Ornithologists deride the notion and fishermen, who are used to gulls flocking about when they are cutting bait, say the birds are only looking for food, but I don't believe them. As I watched, five or six gulls would ride the wind, deftly matching the lift of their wings to the strength of the gusts, and were able to remain absolutely stationary in the air over the beach, sometimes for minutes at a time. Then one or another would peel off, dive downwind, and come back up again, to resume its place with the others, motionless in the wind. Never once did I see them dive down for food, or even seem to be looking for something. Perhaps there is some obscure Darwinian purpose to all this. Perhaps they are merely airing out their feathers. Perhaps they are proving to potential mates what terrific fliers they are, but it still looks like playing to me. Why not? If natural selection has given them these superb wings, what is so outre about the notion that they are actually enjoying that with which they are blessed? Indeed, the ornithological orthodoxy seems to me unnecessarily dour.
In the summer you can see the ravens playing in the winds too. A raven will balance, motionless, on an updraft, until, with a subtle change of windspeed or just a decision made inside its dark skull, it will shift its wings to ride an invisible crest of air at great speed. As British nature writer Paul Evans puts it, "the most dramatic displays are when a raven launches through the wind, rolls, flips over and back, then fans out the wings and tail in a mighty swish to soar away with great insouciance."4 Near our house the ravens soar, clasp talons with a fellow, and then . . . tumble, in a raven game of chicken, to see which bird will unclutch the other first before risking being dashed against the earth. Again, I suppose it is plausible that they are merely demonstrating bravado in a kind of dominance ritual dictated by natural selection and the need to impress girl ravens and therefore sire young, but perhaps this (imagining them as grotesquely competitive as humans) is the anthropomorphizing, and not the playfulness.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it is certainly a fact that birds— and insects too—have learned over the long millennia of evolution to live in the wind in a way that humans cannot, to live in it, understand it, and use it, as transportation, a source of food, as a locus for sexual adventure, and even for foretelling, since many birds seem able to predict the weather from the winds. Indeed, some birds spend most of their lives in the air; albatrosses, for example, seldom land; a new study in 2004 found that albatrosses routinely circumnavigate the globe twice in a season, even sleeping in the air, maintaining themselves aloft with some sort of natural autopilot. They only come down to feed.
Still, none of these astonishments has attracted the human imagination more than the apparently effortless way birds take to the air—pace our thoughts on those gulls hanging motionless in the breezes on the shore, or the way the great raptors use updraft thermals (anabatic wind systems) to gain altitude without expending any energy.
It looks so easy.
The gulls I had been watching disappeared by late morning. Not necessarily because they were tired of the game, but a couple of them had spotted one of our lobsterman neighbors rebaiting out on the bay, and were circling overhead waiting to see what could be gained. Typically, for gulls have superb eyesight, within minutes a dozen or more appeared, flapping vigorously upwind, from where they had been sitting on the rocks out on Coffin Island. They took up station over the boat, like patrol aircraft on security