Hi All,
The two stories Maurits told are both charming
enough stories and if they make people feel nice, that is fine. I'd tell the
stories myself if they happened to me but see no need to invoke the mystic in
the telling. Of course there are levels of perception and communication between
species, but just look at the events as they happened and they are easily
explainable and we should always consider the simplest realistic
explanation.
The gull in Maurits' story was probably so
entangled, stressed, preoccupied, close to drowning, hungry and exhausted
it was unable to fly or swim properly and was pushed like any other flotsam by
the waves to the shore, where Maurits was standing, but I reckon Maurits
adjusted his location and walked to the likely spot so they would meet. So the
meeting wasn't the bird's doing. Also consider the Silver Gull entangled in
fishing line that failed to fly away (maybe because it was entangled) and slowly
bobbed on the surface until a friendly Sea-Eagle came along and untangled it.
Sadly for the gull, part of the process of disentanglement involved being eaten.
Then there are all those poor seabirds oiled in tanker spills. Of course they
understand that people are helpful to them and that is why they make it to the
rescue centres. Of course they also deliberately get themselves covered in oil,
so that us nice people would have mystic stories to tell about us being there to
rescue them.
As for the Magpie-lark story: Here is my
take....baby Magpie-lark falls out of nest, raised by people, grows up not
scared of people, leaves home, disperses, keeps begging from people, meets
someone new and says hello, looking for a hand out, walks right up to person's
hand, the person who is for his own reasons standing still and has been for
some time, is therefore not scary to the bird, the person is so charmed by
this unexpected event that they continue to stand still and just let the bird
approach, after that the bird doesn't last long, it gets caught by a cat or dog
because it hasn't been taught to flee them (thus explaining why this
encounter only happened once).
In my earlier message I forgot to add solar and
lunar eclipses to the list of "signs". These have sometimes featured
prominently, given all sorts of portents of doom or whatever, but they are
totally predictable, simply a matter of geometry. Of course "Indigenous
people around the world know, within their own ways of knowing, about the types
of communication and interaction that Maurits is contemplating." That was their
way of explaining things. The types of those thoughts are exactly the same as
what so called advanced European people postulated (maybe even less silly than
our ancestors thought, such as all of astrology). Fortunately we have now moved
on, or at least I thought we had.
Philip
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