Hi Tweeters

I was walking home fairly late from work Hallowe'en night and was within a
few hundred feet of my house in Vancouver's Kitsilano district when a
distant, odd noise turned my ear-radar on. A minute or so later, eight
Trumpeter Swans came sweeping in low over the trees and houses, eight *big*
white ghosts catching the streetlights on their underwings. They flew out
of the southwest and as soon as they went over the south shoreline of
Burrard Inlet, they headed
straight north. They limited their calling to a few muted, French horn-like
mellow barks quite unlike the full-throat baying, yapping, and blatting I'm
used to hearing from these birds on their wintering fields.

How incongrous, I thought, what with firecrackers and screamers being lit
off everywhere, and kostumed kidz dragging their parents around on every
block in sort of a reverse March of Dimes for Tooth Decay, and then I
thought, what the heck, it's Hallowe'en and great white ooglyboogly Things
are *supposed* to carom around at night making unearthly noises.

So that got me wondering, it being Hallowe'en, how many ghost legends
originated from people's naive observations of nocturnal migrant swans, and
if other myths have a similarly innocuous seasonal origin. Having seen this
sight and being able to put it into an ornithological context is one thing
(okay, to put you poor aesthetes out there out of your misery, it was
*also* an immensely and spookily beautiful, soul-stirring, sight as well),
but I can also understand that to see it when wrapped in stultifying and
terrifying superstition must have incited more than one far-from-home
woodchopper or traveller to promise his mother's soul (if he's from a
culture where it's said that the old dear hangs about after death) that
he'll change the flowers on her grave *much* more frequently from then on.

At the same time such a person would likely know empirically what these
things were, as most men and women who spend a lot of time out of doors
tend to be pretty observant, though they could simultaneously believe
something totally contradictory. As our own current political and religious
mythologies starkly show, we likewise can put a *lot* of distance between
what we believe and what we know to be true. Any science (such as
ornithology--just to name a randomly-chosen example ;-) is the process of
narrowing that distance.

A reminder of that was the treat the swans gave; the trick is in the angle
of perception. Happy Hallowe'en.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net