and it is apparently all part of the plan. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p028w8yc Reality is stranger than fiction.
OMG, that's freaking HORRIFYING! How can that be a good system, parent birds?!? Leave him on top until he can fly! Come on, it's not like you guy can't flap up there!
Barnacle Goose Gosling had to change his name to Ryan Gosling in order to have a career as a Hollywood actor, though his friends still call him Barney (or Barnacle, if it's a formal occasion). He also had to quit falling off 400 ft cliffs because the insurance companies objected.
It's really small, weighs very little and all that fluff would give it a high drag coefficient. They're not hitting the ground with as much impact as would seem intuitive. These aren't the only water fowl to do this. Another BBC/Discovery Channel show with David as the narrator showed some other kind of baby duck (not a goose, but a duck in this other case) jumping out of a hole in a high tree to the forest floor. Not 400 feet maybe, but same deal. Lizards jump off my outside staircase all the way to the sidewalk in the front of the house and just run off like nothing. I imagine if I tried that, the end result would be a tad different.
Yeah, the sudden silence in the clip at that point and the subsequent ugliness of the little gosling hitting again and again as unsettling. In the end, though, all of that served to slow his final speed enormously before reaching momma and poppa.
Yes and it makes every cliff head-banger of the terminally cute little guy all the more heart wrenching.
I know, right? It's like, "Here is my offspring, the next generation to carry on my genes to produce more offspring. Let's make it jump off a cliff." Bad parenting, Mr. and Mrs. Birds. Bad, bad parenting.
What no one knows is that within bird culture, Barnacle Geese are the Furians of the water fowl. Trial by fire from the beginning. That little gosling, that little fluffball, is going to grow up to be a goose Riddick.
Well, you can pretty much be sure that the rest of your life is going to be better than your first day ...
Imagine the Mother's Day and Father's day for that little gosling. "Happy Mother's/Father's Day to the most wonderful mother/father in the world, who let me jump off a cliff mere minutes after I hatched from my egg!"
