The Canadian geese were agitated in Loring Park today as I walked to work. Seemingly uneasy with the near-frost we had last night (or perhaps with the diminishing population of homeless people -- people are abandoning the park for warmer shelters), the geese grazed the park in packs, or gangs, or perhaps flights. A single flight pulled at the grass, all heads down except for one (and that one head always changing as the goose on guard lowered its head to eat, and another stopped eating and glanced around, resembling in order nothing so much as a Whack-a-Mole game), but still giving furtive glances toward the sky and edging out the seagulls from prime piles of charity crumbs. "Crumbs don't come from commuters, and especially not steadily walking ones," goes the goose lesson, and so the geese largely ignore me, ambling aside only when I get too close and allowing only the guard to devote full attention to the passing Quaker.

The seagulls seemed more annoyed with the day than anything else, their heads withdrawing partway, turtle style, into their ruffled neck feathers. Perched on one leg to keep the other warm and glancing around, they seem to accept the coming cold somewhat more stoicly, if not with any more excitement, than the geese.

That the geese seemed agitated seemed normal at first glance (it *is* fall after all), but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered -- how would it feel to be so in thrall to an urge that you would fly thousands of miles merely to satisfy it? How many times in the course of a day do people trust their hindbrains that completely?

And as I walked in the door to the office I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I had done exactly what my body had said it needed without thinking about it, without compartmentalizing it into some greater regimen of logic and forethought. I eat when I think I should, I sleep when I think I can, I exercise when I think I haven't recently.

Even granting that hunger and hormones indicate some kind of relationship with the animal mind exists, craving a peanut butter and jelly does not really reside in the same order of magnitude as joining a bunch of friends and lovers (or strangers and enemies, for all we know of the geese) and travelling multi-thousands of miles together simply because it "feels" like it's time to do it.

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