Barnacle Geese grace our shores every winter - mostly in the NW, around Donegal. And we have long been familiar with the goslings' "running of the gauntlet". WHAT was Mother Nature thinking when she made the decision to have them do THIS? Yet many make it. They are a lovely little goose. (Must admit I did not watch the film...)
Bobbie, have you ever read Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"? She's an amazing essayist...here's a quote:
If an aphid lays a million eggs, several might survive. Now, my right hand, in all its human cunning, could not make one aphid in a thousand years. But these aphid eggs--which run less than a dime a dozen, which run absolutely free--can make aphids as effortlessly as the sea makes waves. Wonderful things, wasted. It's a wretched system. ...
"Say you are the manager of Southern Railroad. You figure that you need three engines for a stretch of track between Lynchburg and Danville. It's a mighty steep grade. So at fantastic effort and expense you have your shops make nine thousand engines. Each engine must be fashioned just so, every rivet and bolt secure, every wire twisted and wrapped, every needle on every indicator sensitive and accurate.
"You send all nine thousand of them out on the runs. Although there are engineers at the throttles, no one is manning the switches. The engines crash, collide, derail, jam, burn... At the end of the massacre you have three engines, which is what the run could support in the first place. There are few enough of them that they can stay out of each others' paths.
"You go to your board of directors and show them what you've done. And what are they going to say? They're going to say: It's a hell of a way to run a railroad.
"Is it a better way to run a universe?
--Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974
