Am I a migratory bird?

O

n December 2018 it’ll be a year that I am 8,353 km away from home. At the same time, a North American Arctic tern will have flown 5 times that distance and a Blackpoll Warbler will have flown 6,000 km from the wintering grounds (Puerto Rico, Lesser Antilles, and northern parts of South America) to the breeding grounds (New Brunswick in Canada and other places in the United States). As a matter of fact, these later little birds fly non-stop over an average of 62 hours, up to 3 days, which would be the same as to flight from Kamloops to Barcelona 6 times. Isn’t that a miracle? It’s no surprise to me that aircrafts were designed based on these marvelous and extraordinary creatures.

As Matt was relating extraordinary stories about migration and birds, I kept on thinking about the journey migratory birds take year after year—do they miss home? do they even know where home is?... Yes, of course they know where home is,  because they return every year to breed. Something inside their tiny bodies is connected with that piece of land where they were born, and it turns on every spring—call it home, call it Mother Nature but something calls them to return. And this mechanism, this genetic program, is the responsible for their migratory restlessness.

Whilst the class was almost at its end, more thoughts and questions didn’t cease to pop up in my mind. Do I have the same innate program? Is someone trying to call me home? Am I like E.T.?... I might have a similar innate program that enables me to know where my home is but I sure don’t have all the other mechanisms that make migratory birds so efficient; for me, stars are shiny dots in the sky made out of gas and plasma (a superheated state of matter composed of subatomic particles), yet for them, stars take part in a bigger map which they can follow to get home (the magnetic field, sun compass, spatial orientation and experiences cues are crucial components of the map, too).

Friedrich Nietzsche once said “Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says ‘All for me’ is a horror to us”—yet I think that is not the absolute truth. We, humans, believe in the superiority of our species because our capacity to reason, however Mother Nature didn’t only create one admirable feature; there are plenty of others which are worth worshiping, for instance the capacity of restlessness of birds. If we are the super-species in the “brain capacity and ability to construct things” field, birds are the super-species in the “physical resistance and lack of laziness” field. Laziness… or may be referred as Sloth (one of the seven deadly sins) is a behavioral trait that birds lack and modern human society has it in abundance; a bird that doesn’t weight more than 20 g flies from Barcelona to Moscow non-stop for 3 days, yet I can’t walk to university because walking less than an hour it requires too much energy. It is to be embarrassed and ashamed. I am ashamed of my laziness.

There is still a question that remains unanswered: am I considered a migrant?... I don’t have the answer for this question myself, but one thing I’m sure about—our understanding of migration has nothing to do with bird migration. They are the true migrants.