The Up-Flight of Birds

English translation
of Le Petit Prince

"... for his escape he took advantage of

  the migration of a flock of wild birds."

With that imaginative explanation, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tells how his title character in The Little Prince made his escape from the isolation of his own tiny planet to come to the planet Earth. That 1943 children's book weds that statement with Saint-Exupéry's charming drawing in which the little prince grips a cluster of strings that shoot up to eleven birds flying upward, lifting him off the ground -- in the way a cluster of helium-filled balloons might.  Even though the tiny planet and tethered birds are fanciful, the author's imagery takes advantage of something many people have seen in the real world:  The instant and virtually simultaneous flight up from the ground of a small flock of birds.

Birds in flight are not easy to capture convincingly with a camera.  Capturing a virtually simultaneous liftoff from the ground effectively is even harder.   If the shutter speed is too slow, the birds in the photograph will be only a blur, obscuring the gracefulness of their wings.  If the shutter is clicked prematurely, the birds will appear too close to the ground, seemingly leaden, as if they were having a hard time getting aloft.  The camera will not have captured that exhilarating burst of energy in which birds spray upward and outward.

So critical to many birds has been this ability to take to flight instantly as a group that it has been reinforced in some species with instinctive alarm cries.  In the case of white-winged doves, evolution has taken such group-protection to a higher level in two ways. First, white patches on the doves' wings flash when they take flight, thus adding a visual alarm.  Moreover, the white-winged doves need not cry vocally, because the doves' sudden flight upward causes their very wings to give off a sharp, twittering warning-sound made by the air passing through the feathers.

Some mornings on which I was driving to work, following my routine path that some days felt like a rut, I would occasionally see such a liftoff of social birds such as pigeons or grackles. Their sudden energy would give my own spirit a lift.

In a mysterious way, the up-flight of birds intersects with something that seems to be instinctive about our human nature.  Namely, that our own facial expressions and bodily bearings droop when we are discouraged, but then lift up when our spirits become encouraged.

There is something deeper here than individual human psychology. There is something here about being able to open ourselves to greater possibilities that lie unseen in this world.  This deeper level, for example, is evidenced by the way the facial and bodily bearings of "down" and "up" are employed in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament).  When Cain is discouraged by the inequalities of human fortune, God intervenes as if to try to prevent vengeance, asking Cain, "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen?" (Genesis 4:6, NRSV).  In many of the Biblical books, people are exhorted to lift up their heads.  And lift up their eyes.

~~~

Are there any ways birds lift your spirit?  How does looking up and about restore you?

(The Saint-Exupéry quote is from his The Little Prince, trans. from the French by Katherine Woods, © 1943.  p. 2.)

(The photo of the cover of The Little Prince is used under Fair Use.)

(The photo Pigeons is by Danko Durbić.)