Wuv, twue wuv, is what bwings us together today.
This is the company’s website.
It appears to be something like a seagull.
Bah! If so, stylized or not, they employed a bad artist. Seagulls don’t have wings that look like that while soaring 
.
ETA: One year my mother had a calendar with drawings from a local artist. One month was a hummingbird with jointed wings, which always drew my eye and made me annoyed. Look at a photograph and pay attention to anatomy, random artist!
As far as symbolism, I think they are going for a generic bird-- or the “Socratic ideal of a bird.” Not any bird in particular. You, know, soaring to heights we can only imagine? free and unfettered? Did you look at the whole website? their selling point is that you get the disposition of your dreams, and exactly what your dearly departed would have wished for.
You can have a traditional burial in the casket you always wanted, or you can be cremated, and make a day of it, going out to sprinkle the ashes over the sea, of you can even have them compressed into a diamond! You can be grief-zilla, and they will keep you happy!
OK, my German isn’t great-- in fact, it’s mostly Yiddish, but there are pictures.
They seem to quote Jonathan Livingstone Seagull pictorially on their website, but the logo is definitely no seagull. Seagulls have pointy wings, the picture shows the feathers at the wigtips spread out.
Now I picture the organist at the funeral playing Neil Diamond. Hum.
I don’t live on a coast, and am pretty ignorant regarding water birds, unless geese are water birds. I defer to your knowledge-- just going by the pic on the brochure of all the birds flying over what must be a sea since Germany has no Ocean coasts.
Like I said, it’s probably a Socratic ideal of a bird. But Germany’s national bird is some kind of eagle, isn’t it?
Don’t have a copy of this book, but you can find large chunks of it reproduced in different places on the web, and I grew up in the 70s, so naturally, I had it read to me more than once.
It is totally something the website would like to invoke.
Well, yes it has, two coasts actually (North Sea and Baltic):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Germany_Coast_adm_location_map.svg
Yes, it has two sea coasts; it also has major rivers, like the Rhine & the Danube, which I have not seen (well, I have seen the Danube in Bratislava, but not in Germany), but which I imagine attract birds all through the country.
What I said though was “ocean coasts.” Germany does not have any of these.
Ah, I see what you meant, but in my book ocean and sea are synonyms, and of course the North Sea and the Baltic Sea are parts of the Atlantic Ocean. Anyway, what I can assure is that there are many seagulls at the German shores.
The North Sea I’ll give you, but if the Baltic is part of the Atlantic then so is the Mediterranean.
We have enough Canada Geese in Indianapolis to make another Canada. They LOVE the White River, and most of them don’t even leave for the winter. They have learned somehow to make shelters, and there is plenty to eat, and I mean plenty. There are goslings born in February.
Seagulls haven’t managed to make it here, but if someone deliberately introduced them, they’d probably be bossing the geese around before you could say “Toronto.”
I would say so, the Mediterranean is a partial sea of the Atlantic. At least that’s how I learned it.
Even here in the middle of Germany, 300 km from any coast and thousands of km from Canada, we have a big population of Canada geese. I don’t know how they made it here, and I don’t remember seeing them in my childhood, but in the last few decades you’ve been seeing them anywhere near water.
I meant to post about this when it was first up, then got caught up in the bird thing.
I used to interpret at an Episcopal church, so I know a lot about them. They were my favorite church to interpret for because not one person ever, even once, tried to convert me.
Anyway, the specific church I worked for had an assistant to the rector called a “curate” who was a woman, and I noticed that instead of a word like “clergyperson,” they used “clergy” as a singular word. This was about 30 years ago. Can anyone confirm this is common use in the E. church?
I’ll bet they caught a ride on a ship. The ships go fast enough now that even if they couldn’t get a lot to eat for some reason, they’d be OK. I’m thinking merchant ships, not passenger ships.
Fortunately we have the indisputable source of Wikipedia. We did it to ourselves!
Canada geese have also been introduced in Europe in the early 17th century by explorer Samuel de Champlain who sent several pairs of geese to France as a present for King Louis XIII. The geese were first introduced in Great Britain in the late 17th century as an addition to King James II’s waterfowl collection in St. James’s Park. By the middle of the 18th century, the Canada geese have established populations in France and Great Britain,[32] but also in Ireland. They were also introduced in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Scandinavia, and Finland in the 20th Century, starting in Sweden in 1929. Most European populations are not migratory, but those in more northerly parts of Sweden and Finland migrate to the North Sea and Baltic coasts.[33]
Yes, that’s the idea. Some background: mourning imagery in Germany, when not Christian themed, is often nature-themed - see three of the mourning ads from one of the mourning notices pages in my local paper today.
Nature images are considered comforting to grieving Germans, and getting one’s ashes buried under a tree is somewhat popular if you do not wish a conventional burial plot. Related in idea: the German version of Morning has broken (Morgenlicht leuchtet) is also often sung at funeral services (it’s in my protestant hymn book as #455).
Lots of grieving, plus “I lost my reading glasses on Olga Street”. Now that’s a local paper.
Yes, they both are. And before you ask, yes, so’s the Black Sea.