Migratory birds, no jet lag to feel ever at home?

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Whenever I catch sight of a flock of migratory birds in flight, I strike up a conversation starting with: what are your international roaming rates? Doesn’t it cost a lot to use Google Maps while roaming? Mostly they don’t look like they’ve even heard me. I am not hurt. How could they possibly know my Malayalam?  Nor would they expect me to speak their Russian.

Siberian cranes fly eastward searching for warmer places in the Southern part of India. How do they manage flying at such high altitudes crossing the Himalayan mountain range without losing their way?


I must be naïve to ask such a question. They started doing it way before the advent of computers, let alone GPS. Siberian cranes use their own inbuilt GPS and coordinates inherited from their forefathers. Finding one’s way home was very much a life skill for our own hunter gatherer forefathers.  But it became a lost art just like our ability to read clouds or being a sure-shot backyard meteorologist. A trade-off with technology for the sake of convenience.

Well, the trees our wayworn feathered guests perch on must be luckier. I used to feel sorry for trees for they can’t move and travel the planet. They are glued to the earth. Even in the worst drought, they cannot leave while animals around migrate. However. It was a later realization for me that the stationary nature of trees often seems compensated for by the birds which choose to chirp on them. Birds move around and collect news from wherever to share with the host at night. Loosing oneself in the stories of yore and thousands of miles away from different lands across the globe they flew over, the trees must be intoxicated into a trance-like sleep, night after night.

Do trees remember the birds that once nested in their branches? Do birds care about the trees that once hosted them offering bed and breakfast in the form of fruits, nuts and insects? No idea. I love to believe they do. They do enquire after each other’s well-being and share their stories from far-off. The Swallow in Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” did talk to the Prince. During the migratory long-distance flights, she couldn’t catch up with her flock. Exhausted, she settled down on the shoulders of the statue of the Happy Prince, hoping of course to start afresh the next morning.

“High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large ruby glowed on his sword-hilt”. So began Oscar Wild his beautiful short story. The Prince had never seen sorrow while alive enjoying the pleasures of the palace but was shedding tears now seeing the plight of the people. The Swallow ran errands for the Prince, taking each valuable in turn to the ones in distress, near and far.

In 2018 a biopic of Wilde was released bearing the title of his famous short story. A just tribute to the star of the aesthetic movement in English literature.

Just as ephemeral as a view of birds of passage, this year too is fast running out. Edibleshoots wishes you all a merry Christmas, happy 2020, and an exhilarating semester break. Love you all.  
                                                                                                       [Photo credit: A pair of eyes in love]                                

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