A Speckled Dove flies through from behind my left shoulder like a rocket propelled grenade right by six feet off the ground over the bulbuls and pulls a high-G steep climb over the Travellers palms.
Half the bulbuls take off in fright and perch in the Poinciana (aka Flame Tree, aka 凤凰树 Feng Huang Shu). The other half are still on the lawn. I’d been observing them pretty closely since before the Dove fly-by. The ground-stayers had looked up, gone “meh” and kept foraging.
So here we had birds making judgement calls. Assessing risk. Putting lie to the calumny “bird brain”. These are individuals! But still acting in tribes. Like Party people.
The flight-to-the-tree mob are the liberals, the media, the “better-safe-than-sorry” crowd. Democrats, if you must. The lawn-stayers, the risk-assessors, are the Rest.
You need your people to be cautious or your people won’t survive.
You also need your people to be adventurous and laugh in the face of risk or your people won’t thrive.
Does that sound like a life lesson?
