Our company moved from Manhattan to strip mall and highway hell on Long Island. A flock of geese wintered on the grounds of the office building, getting fat and belligerant on the well maintained grass here.
Several of my co-workers, reasonably intelligent people capable of complex problem solving and who are not blind, have stated that geese cannot fly. Not one or two mistaken people, but close to a dozen have made this statement.
Granted these geese are big and fat, but haven’t you heard of migration, seen I’ll Fly Away or even looked up into the sky and seen those fat menaces circling?
Has anyone else ever witnessed this sort of mass mental meltdown?
People believe all sorts of stupid things. Or else they come to their own stupid conclusions. It may be that because these particular geese didn’t bother migrating (most likely because the man-made conditions allowed them to live there all year round) your co-workers came to the conclusion that they couldn’t fly, rather than that they simply chose not to, all other evidence aside.
Good thing you’re a member of this Board, Biggirl, because you can help to eradicate their ignorance.
Although it is pretty lame of them never to have noticed flocks of geese flying all over the place in autumn. Cripes, around here you can see and hear 'em for weeks after Labor Day.
Last Friday, I overheard two engineers at my work discussing the flight crew from China that had been released. Eventually, they began trying to figure out why everyone had said that they were returned to the “U.S.” because they were in Hawaii… and as far as they knew, Hawaii was not U.S. territory, much less a state. Both of these two geeks were about 50 years old. I just silently listened to them and couldn’t bring myself to intrude on their conversation.
You be careful, though. Them’s federally protected species and you’re not allowed to pester 'em, cause that’s the law.
MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA! PUNT - MC
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“-Belligerant? Gee, I never noticed.”
One of the Parks around here hires a “Goose Dog” in the fall 'cause the geese crap all over the Pumkin Festival. It’s so much fun to watch the dog screaming all over the park, shoo-ing away those flying crap-factories.
This jackass that works with me just started driving to work.Doesn’t have a license but insists on paying for insurance.And can’t understand that without a license his insurance is invalad.
You know, if I were a dog, that’s the job I’d want! Sounds like fun! They must have a blast tearing around and screaming at birds. I may just go out and do that myself! I might even be able to punt a few if I’m fast.
I did read something this weekend in North Carolina magazine that has a fact that may be related to their delusion.
Canadian geese have become very prevalent in NC in the past few decades. At the first part of this century, they were merely tourists — they flew down here for the winter, and then would fly back to Canada to the lakes at which they were born to reproduce. Some time ago (it may have been in the 20’s, but I don’t quite remember the time frame), in the interest of attracting and keeping more geese down here for hunting purposes, some hunters captured some geese and clipped their wings so that they couldn’t make the return flight home. They then acted as decoys for more geese the following years. They also reproduced, and created geese who consider North Carolina home. We now have tons and tons of geese to poop in lakes and make them unswimmable, be obnoxious to the little children who want to feed the ducks, etc. All the same, though, I always love hearing their honking as they move through the skies in the graceful shifting V’s of their flight.
Another flightless bird-related fact that may be messing up your co-workers’ thought processes: Most domesticated turkeys can no longer fly, because they have been genetically engineered to have such massive breasts that that they can hardly keep from toppling over, let alone fly. This same engineering has also made them massively stupid as well. I’ll refrain from theorizing about what happened to your co-workers…
I think YWalker has hit it on the head, your coworkers are confusing them with turkeys. They’ve been watching WKRP in Cincinnati too much.
For all that is good and holy, how can people not know that geese can fly? The whole V-formation thing … isnt that the first thing people think of when they think of geese? Ok, so you think of geese pooping everywhere first, but then the V-formation.
I swear this sort of mental ornriness is like a virus, it can spread throughout a given population. I once spent a vacation trying (in vain) to convince a large group of in-laws that the Blair Witch Project was not, in fact, a documentary. In hindsight, I think I could have made more progress if I had gotten each one alone, separated from the herd, as it were.
Actually, I just realized what the root of the problem may be – if everyone is from Manhattan, they may be of that breed of New Yorker that likes to pretend everything non-urban is a huge and cosmic mystery, the same people who ask if chocolate milk comes from the brown cows. And even after living among them for 12 years, I’m still never sure when they’re kidding.
I think it’s the size of those hissing crap machines. The biggest birds we City people get to see are seagulls. I also think it just feels safer to believe that they cannot attack from above.
A chunk of my family is utterly convinced that Spike Milligan died last year.
Fact: he gave a statement of his grief at Harry Secombe’s death, not more than a week ago.
Question: How?
My family’s answer (helped creatively by me): Well, didn’t he write his own obituary in the eighties too? Perhaps this statement was left for posthumous use…
However, speaking as one of the many who have been chased across land by a large flock of honking, running geese, I can understand the error. Why would they run when it’d be easier to fly? The answer is that flying would take more time to start and finish, plus a run up and some kind of goosey flight plan, when all you really want to do is scare off an uppity six year-old. But that doesn’t occur to a conclusion which is drawn in the depths of the subconscious memory.
Not so on either account. The reason that domesticated turkeys and chickens can’t fly is that in order to promote fat gain, they are fed high-fat-content food and kept in enclosures too small for them to even try, and which protect them from predators (so they have no pressing need to fly) and so they never develop the muscle density or endurance to do it very well at all.
Domesticated free-range chickens and turkeys (birds allowed to roam freely around the farm) can fly quite easily. Even “fit” chickens don’t like to go very far: a couple hundred yards at the most, but that’s better than you or I can do. A healthy turkey can easily fly a mile anytime it has to. - MC
MC covered this well, but let me add that genetic engineering isn’t at fault. This was done by good-old-fashioned regular old selective breeding, just as nature intended.
I’m sorry, I didn’t intend for this to turn into a debate on domestic turkey breeding. I used the broad term “genetic engineering” to refer to the way in which turkeys are bred these days. I did not mean to imply this was all due to gene splicing or similar technologies; I was just trying to use the term as a type of shorthand to refer to the way in which turkeys are bred and raised today, which is far different than the way things happen in nature. IMO, selective breeding IS a type of genetic engineering. Pumping them full of hormones and antibiotics, along with feeding them high-fat food, keeping them in small enclosures with lighting levels designed to keep their stimulation levels low leads to heavy, meaty turkeys — most of whom grow up without the ability to fly, due to a combination of their physical characteristics and environment. Free range turkeys generally don’t face most of these restrictions (except for selective breeding.)
When I was attending Penn State, I literally had to go to the library and find a book that proved in print that porcupines could not, in fact, shoot their quills as a weapon. The group of people I got into this discussion with insisted that they could. I tried fruitlessly to explain to them that although the quills are not only sharp, but were barbed and would lodge in an animals flesh if they got poked with one, the porcupine was not able to fire them across intervening distances like a machine gun.
Chickens can fly? Seriously? Do you have a cite for that? I’m not trying to be a jerk, I’m seriously interested.
I grew up on a farm and we had chickens for several years (eventually the foxes got all of them), and never saw one of them fly more than about 20 feet or so. These were free-range chickens, and ate a combination of whatever insects and such they could find and corn, so I assume they would fall under the definition of “fit”.
I know there are chicken flying contests in various places. I did a quick search on the web and the longest documented flight I could find for a chicken was under 50 feet, and that was started from a 10 foot high platform.
So I’m skeptical, but it would be really cool. Anybody got a link to a site showing chickens soaring over the trees or anything?
