Have you ever watched little kids playing soccer or basketball during their first years of attempting a team sport? No matter how much you might instruct them about playing their positions, they all flock together like a gang of hornets dive bombing towards a common target!
I thought of these antics while watching the goldfinches out my study window this morning. Goldfinches do everything (foraging, drinking, perching, and even nesting) as a compact flock, just like little children after a ball! I wonder who is the instigator or leader initiating the abrupt change in direction or activity…..
Seemingly out of nowhere, my visiting goldfinches all land on the two neon yellow, cylindrical, thistle-seed-filled bird feeders, frenetically feeding and fluttering while waiting for a perch. Suddenly, they all fly off en-masse in a fllurry of earnestness towards the bird bath for a drink. With their thirst quenched and their feathers showered, the goldfinches fly off again in a herky-jerky, roller coaster formation to the bare branches of my neighbor’s pecan tree, waiting their turn for a repeat lunge at the bird feeders. They do make me laugh out loud!
These silly gold finches know that being a member of a flock is essential to their survival! They migrate south for the winter, grazing on fields of dried up thistle blooms and return north for the summer.
Oh, how I enjoy them while they call my Texas backyard home for a season!
Who has migrated into your neighborhood for a season? Have you set a table for them? Do they feel welcome?
The only creative power I know is that of what might roughly be called ‘love’; not of course a sentimental love: a far more impersonal and less individual emotion. I sometimes think that migratary birds may have it for each other. They fly in the same direction, and have never been seen to interfere with each other’s flights.