“Be like the bird which on frail branches balanced

A moment sits and sings;

He feels them tremble, but he sings unshaken,

Knowing that he has wings.”

–Victor Hugo

I was sitting in Chico’s Bidwell Park, absorbing the beauty of ancient oaks and the creek-side vegetation, when a fleet of bicyclists came spinning down the path. One of the bicycle riders was a small child on a small bike, and I marveled at how balanced he was on a contraption dependent on balance.

Attaining that balance, whether it is on a two-wheeled machine, or the first wobbly days of walking, is a marvelous feat for an upright two-legged human being, but once learned, the bicycling skill remains for life similar to the ability of walking upright. Most animals have four legs to make balance far more stable.

Other than birds and mankind, there are few animals that walk on two legs. Admittedly, having a pair of wings is a  help in mobility–just spread out those marvelous appendages and soar if you wobble on your legs–unless you’re an ostrich that has given up flying when weight accumulated in the evolutionary design. Try getting 300 pounds of bird airborne! A few 30 pounders like eagles, swans, and geese have been able to grow larger wings and stay balanced in the air, but that added weight is a burden compared to a robin’s few ounces.

Precocious babies, such as the killdeer, have no trouble walking/running minutes after being hatched, seemingly endowed with a remarkable instinct of balance and mobility. Compare that with a human baby that apparently wants to use four legs like a dog while learning to crawl into those perilous first steps when it toddles into fall after fall. It is said the development of the big toe is critical in efficient balance and walking. People like basketball ace Kobe Bryant evidently have good big toes. Is that toe trouble Shaq had the reason the Lakers faltered in 2003?

For some ultimate human examples of sterling balance, watch those circus performers sail through the air with the greatest of ease, or the Chinese acrobats who do incredible things with the body. They perform balance acts with the attitude of mind over matter, but to attain that high degree of balancing perfection, they endure long hours of practice, often starting in childhood, just as gymnasts acquire superior balance by youthful exercise. Some of that discipline involves eating, somewhat like M/R reporter Michael L. Whiteley commented in his column: “But, now that I have a butt from all of this overindulgence in food, I have also decided to start working out TO FIND SOME SORT OF BALANCE.” Balance comes in many forms. To some teenagers, a balanced meal is a hamburger in each hand!

Consider the vulture. Watch as it soars in the sky, wings uplifted into the “V” shaped dihedral arc, rocking with the wind, able to keep balanced and stabilized even in shifting air currents, all the while watching the land below for foul fauna, and then able to daintily descend and bring five feathered pounds to a safe landing. (And the Condor! Another glider/balance/pilot/supreme that has a ten-foot wing span and weighs 30 pounds!). I think it has something to do with built-in living gyroscopes something like the ones used in satellites and airplanes. As a boy, I had one of those metal-framed gyroscopes with the encased wheel you would spin in order to see it balance for several minutes until the momentum stopped. The mechanical world is built around balance–just like the vulture–and all construction is leveled and compassed to keep it balanced.

I am told our sense of balance has to do with the mechanism of the inner ear. Perhaps you have experienced dizziness or vertigo. The unsettling condition is connected to that ear business–the function that enables horseback riders to gallop across the wide open spaces and keep mountain climbers adhered to the walls. How critical it is to keep balanced when you’re bending in the garden, landing the trophy fish, tracking the grizzly, or stalking the wild asparagus. Thank your big toes and inner ears! You need all of them!

There are other kinds of balance especially important in our times; mental balance and political balance and environmental balance. Much of the efforts of legitimate environmentalists is to encourage a balance of nature and use of natural resources so that there aren’t any irreversible losses of habitat due to mismanagement. Already we have lost many of our forests on the American continent, over-polluted our rivers, and fouled the air, in addition to losing several hundred species of plants and animals through destruction of the environment by over-zealous enterprises.

There are those who care. Witness the avalanche of objections from environmental organizations when a Chico, Ca, official spoke of “killing the environmentalists” who had blocked several industrial expansions. When you lump dedicated people working for a quality environment with extremists gaining attention through harmful acts, it is an unfair comparison, and those spoken words of “killing,” even if spoken in jest, can never be retracted and will echo down through the ages. It is a balance, although John Muir said the “battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is a part of the universal warfare between right and wrong.”

Remember, there are two sides to a story as there are two wings to a bird, and in between is the vital body being balanced by wise use of rationale in the story and the wings in a bird. The crucial side of wildlife negotiations is to recognize the need to use a certain amount of the natural resources, and a need to save and preserve a certain amount of the environment...that air will blow and streams will flow and birds will fly...healthily. We need some wood for wood products, and we need some trees for aesthetic enhancement of the world we live in and for the wildlife to live in. As we see some species of birds adapting to manmade bridges and constructions, let us adapt a balance of a way of life where there is a place for nature in the midst of land development for the creation of manmade commodities...until it becomes policy to respect the needs of all planet earth inhabitants...and a respect for those who care about the environment and work to ensure future wildlife sanctuary. June 15, 2003