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We all know that South Asia and East Asia feature the most populous cities and nations on the planet…in terms of human life. But is this true for ducks as well? Here is a humorous/nightmarish/cute/troubling (?) video clip of hundreds of thousands of ducks stampeding through the roads of a town in Thailand. I was unable to find out all the details, but I will let the madness speak for itself. Keep watching the video—there is an intermission, but more ducks are on the way!
By means of translation and interviews, Yahoo news has provided us with some of the details of this avian stampede writing that, “Jack Sarathat lives in Thailand and was driving through Nakhon Pathom, about an hour west of Bangkok. Suddenly he was forced to bring his car to a halt. About 100,000 ducks were on the loose and taking over the rural road in the Bang Len district.”
Although we know the place and the person on camera, we still don’t know why these ducks were on the move or where they were from (though it must have been some sort of industrial duck farm clearing inventory). The article says that none of the ducks were injured, but they look far too delicious for me to believe that without question.
This video contextualizes the earlier post about Zhu Yigui, a Fujianese duck farmer, who rose to be rebel king of Formosa before the Chinese authorities of the day crushed him like an egg. It is possible I snickered some when I read that his qualification for leadership was the ability to train and lead ducks. I am not laughing now—it is obvious that ducks in aggregate are a mighty force!
Artist’s Interpretation
My parents’ geese
My parents have a lovely flock of pilgrim geese: I think these geese are mostly a hobby, but I suppose if society ever falls down, Mom & Dad could probably ramp up production and live on them. The geese spend most of their time in a big pond in a field next to a pretty meadow (which in turn is next to an oak forest). The birds play and frolic and pursue their goose romances all the while conniving against one another like Roman patricians. They practice a very intense form of goose politics (goosetics?) which involves lots of self-aggrandizing honking, aggressive jostling, and occasional political murders. The ganders even look a bit like Roman senators with haughty hungry expressions and cloud-white plumage in place of togas (although the females are gray and slightly gentler).
Pilgrim Gander
Today’s flock has reached a parity point where new hatchlings replace unfortunate geese lost to the hardships of nature, society, and misadventure, but it was not always so. The first generation of geese arrived as gormless puffballs in the mail. With no elders to teach them of coyotes, foxes, weasels, hawks, owls, and bobcats, they had to learn some hard lessons on their own. But even once they learned to survive against the wild animals which live in the forest, they still had a lot to learn about the world (like how to fly).
LG the Canada Goose
This is where a very strange character enters the story. One day a wild Canada goose landed on the pond with a female mallard duck. It became obvious that this unhappy duck was the unwilling paramour of the goose, but whenever she tried to fly away from him (I am calling this goose a he, but who really knows?), he would leap into the sky and coral her back down to the pond with his mighty wings and expert flight skills. This weird pair kept to themselves and my parents watched their dysfunctional relationship with bemusement, christening the big strange goose as “LG” (which is short for Lonely Goose). One day a vast flock of migrating ducks landed on the pond, as they made their way to some rich wetland. When they flew off, the mallard female joined them, and LG could not find her among the throng so she escaped and rejoined her kind and her further adventures are unknown.
My mother feeding LG
LG however stuck around and began to insinuate himself into my parents’ flock of ignorant catalog-bought adolescent domestic geese. At first they were standoffish and he was sadly alone at the bottom of the gooseatics hierarchy, but soon he was whispering in ears, teaching useful life lessons, and plotting against less-popular geese. When he moved into the middle of their society he was able to teach them to fly. I have a distinct memory of LG flying from the farmyard down to the pond with the pilgrims flying after him. He landed gracefully on the pond and bobbed scerenely on the water as the pilgrims crash landed pathetically into the mud and the fields like the aftermath of some WWI aerial battle. Indeed, flying lessons were not without casualties and my mother’s favorite pet goose swerved into a barn in order not to fly into her (which illustrates a degree of self-sacrificing care).
Once the flock knew how to fly, LG ascended to the top of the hierarchy and he has been a top goose ever since. At first my parents were afraid that he would fly off with the whole flock and the domestic geese would all turn feral, but the opposite seems to have happened. Who knows what LG’s real back story is? He has a hole in his foot and he looks somewhat old. I speculate that he spent his life flying back and forth between the Arctic Ocean and Alabama until one day he saw a farm pond where he could retire and work his wiles on perfectly naïve geese. Geese live loooong lives (they can get to be more than 30 years old) so this may be true. Or maybe he is some sort of bird-sanctuary renegade or just a big human-loving freak.
Whatever the case, these days LG has a special pilgrim goose girlfriend whom he looks after when she is nesting. He doesn’t seem to be fertile with pilgrim geese and they raise broods of pure pilgrim goslings… but maybe it’s best not to pry too closely into other people’s domestic arrangements.
LG leading the pilgrims!
LG is mean as a serpent to the other geese (aside from his mate, with whom he is exceedingly tender) however he is very adroit at managing the humans in his circle. He enjoys eating corn out of people’s hands (which most of the domestic geese will not do) and he tolerates being petted. He is a very weird, weird wild animal. I kind of love LG, and I always get angry when people badmouth Canada geese for defecating on golf courses or aggressively chasing dumpy middle managers into mud holes. He makes his own way in life. If he ever got tired of his girlfriend and his minions and being hand-fed corn he still has mighty wings and he could fly back to the enduring freedom of the sky above, but I really think he has retired and settled down. I still wish he could narrate his biography, but I guess his friendship will have to suffice.
When I was a child, my favorite tv show was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Although the good doctor’s naïveté about cold war politics sometimes dismayed my realpolitik-minded parents, the amazing breadth of his show’s exploration of the natural world–and the wider universe beyond–was a wonder to me. For the first time I was introduced to quasars, pulsars, and stellar aging. From Sagan’s delightfully filmed documentary, I learned about Kepler, the Kreb’s cycle, DNA pair sequencing, and the great library of Alexandria. The eclectic scope of Cosmos was a direct inspiration for this blog (although I can hardly claim to be such a polymath). Hopefully the new Cosmos–with a new science hero, Neil deGrasse Tyson–will inspire today’s generation of children to look beyond sports and the internet up to the soaring science of the firmament!
Jovian Life Envisioned by Adolf Schaller for COSMOS, Carl Sagan (1980)
My very favorite segment of Cosmos however, did not involve real science at all, but rather airy speculation about extraterrestrial life on a gas giant planet. Carl Sagan, his physicist colleague, E. E. Saltpeter, and the space artist, Adolf Schaller, worked together to imagine a floating ecosystem which might exist on a planet such as Jupiter. In the tempestuous atmosphere of such a world, ammonia, hydrogen, methane, and water are violently stirred together to form organic molecules. Small drifting organisms might feed on these compounds and reproduce as lighter spores before air currents bear them down to their doom (in a cycle reminiscent of phytoplankton). Giant floating life-forms like living hot-air balloons would stay in the habitable zone of the atmosphere by photosynthesis or by grazing on the microscopic “plankton”. These beings could be kilometers in diameter and would congregate in vast aerial schools. Sagan and Saltpeter even envisioned jet-propulsion super predators which would blast through the alien skies feeding on the huge clouds of “floaters”.
It is a tremendously compelling vision! Now, whenever NASA or ESA releases a new list of exoplanets, I pause to wonder whether such alien creatures are actually found floating on the super-Jupiters and strange giant worlds which orbit far-off stars. However today I would like to present an even more fantastic vision—and one which humankind could actually create! By combining Sagan’s imaginary vision with contemporary aerospace and biotech research, it is possible to visualize my own fantasy of human colonization of Venus…or even upon other worlds with complex atmospheres.
Ornithopter based on Jellyfish (Dr. Ristroph and Dr. Childress)
Just this year, two aeronautical engineers, Dr. Ristroph and Dr. Childress, crafted an ornithopter based on the swimming motion of a jellyfish. The tiny mechanism relies on four teardrop-shaped wings oriented around a dome-like apex to achieve stable, directed flight. At the same time a new array of futuristic blimps, zeppelins and dirigibles are being brought to market to transform the skies of earth. Most importantly Craig Ventner, the bioengineer-entrepreneur, is out there sampling the esoteric genetics of the deep ocean and forging ahead with synthetic genomics (which is to say he is building new living things from scratch). In our lifetime someone will figure out how to meld Ventner’s synthetic organisms with the advanced engineering and technology which are the hallmark of our age. The possibilities then grow exponentially out of this world.
“Space Zeppelin” by Rugose.
Imagine if the floating ecosphere invented by Sagan and Saltpeter were instead a floating society-economy based on advanced engineering and bioengineering. There would be levitating cities which are also bioengineered life-forms (like the vast balloon beings of Sagan’s invention). Between these cloud cities would fly flocks of tiny ornithopters that would gather resources for further farming/engineering.
Jet propelled aircrafts and super habitats would zip between the living arcologies. Armored crawlers would inch through the deeper layers of atmosphere or creep along the molten pressurized ground. Eventually there might be flying bio-colonies which self arrange out of many highly specialized flying zooids—like the siphonophores which are so prevalent in our oceans! These collective entities would act as sky factories to build an ever more symbiotic and efficient synthetic ecosystem. Humankind, living things, and technology would no longer be at odds but would grow together to form the ideal world of tomorrow. Life, beautiful and united would expand to new planets and develop into a stronger, brighter presence in the cosmos.
Siphonophorae (Ernst Haeckel, 1904, plate 7 of “Kunstformen der Natur”)
ferrebeekeeper 