Wednesday March 8, 2006
Stupidity tests
Quail are the only creatures that make chickens look smart.
We have a bird feeder on our deck. We keep it filled through the winter, when the natural supply of food for over-wintering birds is limited by snow. We don\’t want to make the birds dependent on us.
Finches usually discover the free-food bonanza first. Then the sparrows and starlings. Then the flickers and the stellars jays. Eventually, the quail find the feeder – just about the time that spring arrives.
It took the quail six winters to find it at all.
Now they return regularly. But they have very little spatial sense. The feeder has a platform around it, big enough for several dozen finches or sparrows, three or four flickers, or a pair of mourning doves. Up to eight quail could fit on the platform, if they spread out. But quail apparently can\’t do that. They all have to bunch together. Inevitably, half of them get bumped off — literally.
Every other bird species learns about glass. Not quail. We have a glassed in railing on our deck. Predictably, the quail come in for a landing – through the glass. Or they try to take off – through the glass.
There\’s a loud bonk. A dazed-looking quail staggers around the deck for a while like a drunk heading home from a Christmas party. Eventually, it tries to take off again – through the glass.
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The notion that lemmings periodically pitch themselves en masse into the Arctic Ocean to drown has been proven false. Apparently Walt Disney invented the myth for dramatic effect in a nature film. But quail regularly sacrifice themselves in front of cars. They scurry out of the bushes like a plague of locusts descending on ancient Egypt, reach the other side, and then decide that where they\’ve just come from was safer and scurry back across the road, while the onrushing car plows helplessly into them.
Quail would be laughable. If they weren\’t so much like humans.
Faced with a crisis, we almost always scurry back to familiar practices – even if those practices led to the current crisis.
Political parties turn to former luminaries to lead them out of the wilderness.
Businesses that got into trouble because they fired all their experienced staff try to get out of trouble by laying off even more staff.
A society addicted to fossil fuels spends more and more money trying to extract more and more of the stuff from more and more difficult locations. Sometimes it launches horrendously expensive wars to secure its supply.
And when the religious tenets we have taken for granted for so long come under fire, we tend to cling to them more and more obstinately. We memorize texts that support our viewpoint. We attack anyone who challenges us to re-think doctrines we have long taken for granted.
And that, by the way, is just as true of Hinduism and Islam as of Christianity.
By comparison, quail don\’t look so stupid after all.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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