Sketch and story by Tom Godin,
September 22, 2000

The principle of flying comes naturally to a bird. No doubt there is some trial and error but eventually it all seems to work out. With some large birds like the Canada Goose, it is also essential to learn how to 'not fly' while airborne.

To witness 'not flying', watch a group of Canada Geese landing. Some of them employ a tactic that I have heard called wiffling (it may also be spelled whiffling).

When small birds are flying at one height and decide that they want to lose altitude quickly they simply close their wings and fall, then open their wings and brake quite smoothly. This works well for birds that only weigh a few ounces but it would not work well for a bird weighing a few pounds, such as a goose. The sudden opening of the wings after free-fall would exceed the engineering specifications of the bird and something would have to give. This is when the goose wiffles.

A goose, in preparing to land starts some wing braking action but this uses a lot of energy and being heavy, the body still speeds along quite forcefully and the large open wings still create lift. This is not the desired effect for a goose that has decided that it wants to go downward. The best thing to do in such a case is defeat aerodynamics. The goose does this by turning its whole body upside-down, keeping its head aligned as it would if it were in the proper flying position.

With no lift the goose drops like a rock. This is wiffling. The wings are still open during this maneuver and the goose just keeps swinging from the upside-down position to the right side up, as needed, to control the descent. It is hard to catch all the nuances of this tactic as they are being performed because the snapping action from right side up to upside-down is quick.

Three Trans-Atlantic Flights

It took a while for an English bird book to reach me but I thank the couple who sent me this unexpected gift.

The very first bird book I owned and shared with my brother was an old, tattered book about the birds of England. I was very young, probably in grade one or two when we acquired this book. Not knowing that the world was bigger than one place, we started to use this book to identify birds around us. So many pictures in the book looked like birds on the lake where we lived, that we were convinced that this was a local bird book. It never dawned on us that the lack of Chaffinches, Jackdaws, or Blue Tits might have something to do with geography. We just thought the guy who drew the pictures didn't know what he was doing. We really criticized his Goldfinch drawing.

That old bird book is long gone but now I have the new English bird book. Actually it is relevant to all of Europe and I have already spent a good deal of time familiarizing myself with its contents.

The first thing I noticed was the large number of birds we have in common. The other thing is how common names are applied differently. For example the Blackbird of Europe is a black form of our Robin. Both these birds are thrushes. In Latin our Robin is turdus migratorius and their Black bird is turdus merula. Our Blackbird family is not a single species but a group that contains birds like the Grackles and Orioles. The Robin of Europe is not a thrush but I have yet to find out which birds in North America might be similar.

The first European settlers in North America applied the name Robin to almost any bird with a reddish chest. The Red-breasted Merganser was once known as the Sea Robin, so it is easy to see how the Robin we know became the Robin. As I said, I have just begun to get into this new book and it will no doubt prove very educational.

Bird Withdrawal

The local skies are now bereft of Swallows. The last to leave are always the Barn Swallows. The Willow thickets have lost many of their Warblers and Flycatchers. White-crowned Sparrows are passing through the area, having nested north of us. The Solitary Vireo continues to amaze me with its willingness to be hardy. I always imagined they would leave when the slightest cool weather started, but not so. They will, even now erupt into a loud version of their fall song. The Yellowthroat seems to linger late, still calling from cattail stands. I recently heard a Marsh Wren, a bird that likes the same habitat.

By late October or ice-over we will go from about 225 species of birds down to about 50 winter species. I think that is why so many birders also feed the birds. We don't want to let them leave so we try to draw the remaining ones around us to prevent the shock of complete bird withdrawal.