We've been dancing since before our tongues could command th..
🕑 Added 2021-02-07 14:42:45 +0000 UTC
We've been dancing since before our tongues could command the language, perhaps it is the original language, the kind of birds and beasts. I think of showgirls, with their breasts crested with rhinestones, and vibrant plumage surrounding their elegant figures, as they stride and kick in tandem across the stage.
We inherited our limbic system from the dinosaurs, and birds are their closest living relatives. I think about that when I watch the birds at the feeder I placed outside my kitchen window.
At first the room might seem silent, but if you're still enough, quiet yourself, the world becomes so loud. The general sound of birds becomes, the bird in the tree in the neighbors yard, or the birds at the feeder. The sound of seeds spilling, being cracked between beaks, and feathers, and it all seems so loud. They have their own vibrant social world, they display altruism towards their in group and distrust towards the out group. They obey the tacit rules of our society, do they question them? Is it the brave birds, who test the limits of their relationship, who are the anarchist revolutionaries in the bird world?
We both create song and dance and often marry the two for a chance at romance. Some birds mate for life, while others have some variation of nonmonogomy. Some birds form life long homosexual relationships, while others are just trying to bang as many ladies as they can. Courtship ranged from the presentation of a stone, not unlike the symbolism of an engagement ring, to synchronized dance, like those showgirls I saw in Vegas.
Do you think the dinosaurs danced? I wonder how they courted their mates 💖 Anyways, if you don't have a birdfeeder, you should get one, especially durring the cold seasons. I live in the south so we get a lot of migratory birds durring the "cold" months. I live in a neighborhood that is expanding and displacing a lot of native wildlife 💔 providing a feeder is my way of saying thank you and sorry to the birds. It is a respect I pay, because of them, we have dance. Either because we share the same lizard brain, and we have an instinct to express our emotions through song and dance, or because early humans observed this interaction amongst birds social spheres and we imitated them through our own imaginative retelling and explanations of the wild world around the campfire. Most likely, it is both. "Nature", the innate behavior or written programming,
and "Nurture", the environment we are shaped by, are two vines wrapping around eachother for stability, that form the foundation for our psychology.
Since I put my feeder up (a few years ago), I have seen different generations of birds from the same family be raised, fly off, come back, have a family, and go again. They've learned to peck the window when I am too slow to refill the feeder. They trust me not to hurt them, but still maintain a distance. I've made no efforts to feed them from my hand however. I feel like their aversion of humans is one of their rules, and I shouldn't break that. We are cruel creatures, sometimes. But these birds watch and wait for the dogs to be brought in before they flock to the feeder. And it's a competitive environment too, enter the stereotype of the African savanna watering hole, and the hierarchy of the wild.
We all share resources. This planet, the atmosphere, the very air that fills our lungs was the same one that the dinosaurs breathed. Recycling life in real time. If we can connect so powerfully to dance and nature, why not also to nature? All life came from the sea and here we are poisoning it with nuclear water and plastic. So feeding birds, really is one of the smallest ways I can participate as a citizen to this planet, as a human who occupies the natural world, disillusioned by our society.
