Evolutionists are in two minds about birds: one contends they developed from the ground up (theropods), the other from the air down (microraptors). Something they do agree about, however, is that the lightness of a bird’s bones, their essential hollowness, allows for flight. Not that this was evident in the lump-laden papier-mâché model bird which I built as a child: its wings were solid and soggy – as likely to fly as a museum specimen.
Wings are what I like about birds – and, given the choice of fish, fowl or four-footed, it’s likely that most human beings would go flying. It’s a magnificent freedom, rising from this earth into your own, unlimited space. You don’t have to be behind bars to appreciate that: lie sick in bed with a wide window and watch. In the sky beyond, birds come and go every which way. Do they know why they fly there and not here? Do they plan a route? Choose this tree or that? Know where they are going? Where they’ll be sleeping? They are loosed from the soil into an element more expansive and infinite than the earth upon which we tread or the sea where fish live their fishy lives. Their domain touches the universe. Fish tanks may calm the waiting patient; a window with birds uplifts the soul.
Open the window. Birds have sound, too. Perhaps the evolutionists actually have it wrong: it’s not the lightness of bone that allows for flight, but song-propulsion. A birdsong can arrest circling thoughts, dispel grogginess and silence an argument. The bird is not aware that its sound is song to my ears, but that makes it no less special. How much of the world has not been built on song? Birds add colour, sound and dance to the art of life.
What good are advantages in life if they are not appreciated? Birds know theirs: watch a common or garden dove beat its wings to an apex of flight, then roll them out and glide so sweetly down – purely free. Listen to the sparrow turn the gutter outside your bedroom into a concert hall. For them the sky’s no limit. Wings and song make them free.
But that’s not all there is to the bird’s life. What’s the good of being a songbird if there’s no supper to sing for? But how often is a bird found dead from starvation or dehydration? Unlike most other creatures, birds have the range of the sky to rove and a view of what’s below. “Behold the fowls of the air,” were Jesus’ words, “for they sow not, neither do they reap…yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.” Of course, if fed by humans, they develop the habit of competitive gobbling and stuffing of the crop, evidence of that free-lunch mentality rubbing off.
My contention that most humans would choose an avian existence is untested, but you can be sure of one thing. There would be conditions attached: “Only if I were a raptor… . Only if I could be a male, a colourful one… . Only if I could be a swan… .” Admittedly, the regalia of certain birds does defy evolutionary explanation and raptors take no prisoners, but compared to the real riches of a bird’s life, having a hooked beak or fancy plumage amounts to a heap of feathers. Just settle as a LBJ.
It’s best not to differentiate: apart from that flightless one percent, birds live by their wings, wings to race from danger, escape routes being skywide, and wings to enjoy unlimited space. Knowing this, birds don’t fret: wings transport them away from the earth where clutter and noise never ceases to swell, into the air, the sky, the heavens. If birds had not shown us the way, would we ever have imagined flying?
