I was just joking around calling myself a long-legged gooney bird. As a bird I am rather gooney- my wings are way too small, for one thing, and I don't have a beak. As an upright naked ape I make a much better picture. I make a much less gooney mammal than I do a bird.
I looked up 'Gooney bird' on Google just for fun. As I did, I remembered something: Albatrosses used to be called 'gooney birds' Sure enough- the Laysian Albatross.
It just does not fit. As a mammal, and a primate at that, I make a rather gooney bird. The Albatross, however, makes a magnifacent bird. And the mythological picture I have of the Albatross is that of Coleridge: the wild and free spirit of the ocean, magnificent creature of God escorting sailors through the wide sea.
The Albatross is no gooney bird. The albatross is magnifacent.
They suit the mythic picture in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner: birds that soar at sea, through windstorms, for hours at a time without so much as flapping their wings, at sea for thousands of miles to bring food back to their chick, who come to land to nest in the most unaccessible islands in the world, who when they are not raising a chick will go for months or years without seeing land, for days without landing (and landing on the water when they do!), travelling tens of thousands of miles. Travelling a million miles or more in one lifetime. Travelling across much of the world in a single year.
Wow. That sure suits the mythic picture painted by Coleridge!
And that has always been the picture in my mind of the Albatross: Coleridge's Albatross, a most magnifacent bird.
And as for me?
Well, of course I make a very gooney bird.
I am not a bird at all.
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson