Living Free

I’ve never been especially interested in birds: odd, unapproachable, cold creatures somehow. And then we went to live right in the migratory flight path of the pink-footed goose ...

It’s early autumn and the geese are beginning to return. Not yet in their thousands, their tens of thousands, but a few hundred every day. As I walked with the dog in the fields around us, there were little clusters of them feeding, keeping their distance, but resting gently and eating greedily, grateful to have crossed the great tumultuous ocean and touch down on land at last. These are free creatures, designed to travel the huge distances to follow their migratory patterns. Each Autumn we await their honking and feel such joy as we greet their return.

But we also happen to live in the middle of a bird hatchery, so birds feature big in our lives. As I mooch, I am struck especially by the contrast between the wild geese and the other birds who make so much noise, in every season, all around us.

Reared in captivity, from eggs artificially warmed, are many thousands of caged ducks. As we pass near them and the dog snuffles in the wet hedges, the ducks cry out in unison and dash to the far end of their cage to escape her. Not that she could get to them: the wire mesh that keeps them in also keeps her out. But they are afraid, nevertheless. They know nothing else except that cage. Their food and water are provided. They are securely held. Safe: until their time comes to enter the food chain.

But also, on the outside of the cages, are a whole gang of other ducks. These are the escapees. Also reared in captivity, they know only what it is to have their food provided. They struggle to survive without it. At some point, though, there has been a prison break and they have dashed outside of the wire that previously held them. They’re technically free but, because they only know the life of captivity, they go nowhere. They hang around the outside of the cages where, I imagine, food is possible but not plentiful and so they scrabble about in the dirt, dependent on the scraps that fall from the farmer’s food bag.

These are the birds I feel saddest for. They’re no longer captive, in the truest, physical, practical sense. But neither are they free. They hang around in a gang, for ‘safety in numbers’, but their captivity is no less real: the difference being that they don’t get fed and they aren’t protected.

So, there are captive birds who know nothing different, waiting out their lives in a cage. Escapees who don’t know how to live freely and so remain captive without the ‘benefits’. And the free geese, who have the whole world as their feeding ground. Of course, they’re conditioned by their natural rhythms: summer in Iceland, winter in England, but they’re free to be the creatures God made them to be.

I wonder, which kind of bird are you?