In his recent book Outgrowing
God, Richard Dawkins further tries to convince readers of some of the
irrational, contradictory aspects of religious belief. Along the way, he
addresses the subject of superstition. He cites how superstitions often involve
the most mundane happenstances of correlation, which people then proceed to
mistake for causation. A gambler is wearing a red shirt on the night he wins
big at the slot machines. Forever after, he’s convinced that the red shirt
brought him luck, so he always wears it to the casino. When he fails to win,
even when he’s properly appareled, he will elaborate the superstition. Maybe it
was the fact that he wore the red shirt with the collar unbuttoned on his
winning night. If he loses again, he might consider that his winning had
occurred when he had left the top two buttons of his shirt undone. And
so on.
The man will become enmeshed in an
ever more elaborate ritual of preparation, always chasing that certain
combination of factors that he’s sure caused his original success. Dawkins
implies that it might often be just such accretions that build into myth and
from there into whole religions.
His suggestions made me think back
on a remarkable sighting I’d made during my weeks in Edinburgh. I decided not
to try to make a hectic round of the regular tourist sights while I was there,
but just to relax into the routine rhythms of the city. So I spent the better
part of a day sitting in the Princes Street Park under the watchful brow of
Edinburgh Castle. I sat, people–watching, and, as it turned out, seagull-watching.
First one seagull flew onto the
lawn in front of me and started to pitty-pat, pitty-pat dance. Then a second
seagull settled in at a little distance and similarly started to tap dance the
lawn. Before long, there was a third, and then a fourth seagull out there on
the broad greensward, and so there were four, all stomp-stamping the ground.
Each danced at a slightly different tempo, but they all kept up a fast pace.
One was stamping so fast, its feet were a blur.
Once a gull had started this
exercise, it kept at it with a concentration and earnestness unequaled by any
athlete in any gym exercise room. What was going on? Had all the gulls of
Edinburgh gone anorexic and become hell-bent on losing weight? Or had they
somehow acquired the mentality of old vaudeville performers, treading the
boards for dear life, trying to impress the audience before they got hooked off
the stage for the last time?
I sat for hours watching this
chorus line of performers giving their all. Some of the people who walked by
were similarly amazed and took videos. Some passed by, indifferent.
I was one of the amazed. When I got
back to my lodging, I immediately looked for someone to tell my astonishment
to. I had booked at the Emmaus House, a Georgian building in central Edinburgh
that turned out to be run by people affiliated with the Benedictine religious
order in a lay capacity. My room was small, hostel-like. But it overlooked a
lovely garden and had its own bathroom. It turned out I didn’t need an alarm
clock there. A neighborhood cat arrived promptly at 7:00 every morning and
volubly caterwauled its demand for milk, meanwhile calling all of us residents
down to the family-style breakfast served in the kitchen.
Anyone could book there, religious
or non-religious. We only had to refrain from going into the common
lounge/reading room during certain hours every week when the proprietors were
having their meetings or their quiet communion times.
When I arrived back at the lodging,
eager to report my discovery of strange bird behavior, it was near the tail-end
of one of these down-times. So I had to contain my enthusiasm for a bit. But as
soon as the principle manager of the property became available, I rushed over to
tell him about the birds. I told Andrew (of course his name was Andrew – it was
Scotland after all) that I’d seen one seagull after another perform the most
amazing routine. He beamed at me indulgently and said, “Oh, I see you’ve met some
of the Dancing Seagulls of Edinburgh. They’re quite famous, you know.”
I was a little disappointed to hear
that I wasn’t the first to have noticed the bird performance, that their habit
was in fact common knowledge. But I was glad to have finally become privy to these
birds’proclivities. Andrew went on to say that the birds did it in order to
attract worms to the surface. Their tapping replicated the sound of raindrops
falling. The prospect of flooding rain brought the worms up out of their
tunnels.
My goodness! At first I accepted
that explanation given by Andrew and then frequently found on the Internet. But
when I thought about it a little more, that accounting didn’t quite seem to
make sense. I doubted that it was the sound of rainfall that brought worms to
the surface. It seemed to me that only actual heavy rainfall flushed worms up
and out of their subterranean digs. Besides, during my hours of observation, I
hadn’t seen a single worm being caught. Occasionally a bird would look down at
the ground and peck hopefully at a few blades of grass – but its dancing had
yielded nothing.
Now, after having read Dawkins, I’m
considering the birds’ routine in a new light. Could their dancing be a sort of
proto-ritual? Maybe at some time in the distant past, a seagull or two had
gotten lucky with a worm after having inadvertently stomped the ground a bit. Then,
like the gambler and the red shirt, those gulls had become convinced that it
was the stomping that had produced the worm. They taught the trick to their
offspring. Other gulls, observing the resultant tap dancing clans and perhaps
witnessing the occasional worm simultaneously emerge by chance – similarly started
dancing. The practice spread like human dance crazes spread – but this craze
became more persistent, being passed down through the generations.
I have heard of seagulls and some
other birds performing similar dances in other places. But it seems Edinburgh
remains the epicenter of this culture of tap dancing.
But then I remembered a little
more. As I watched, I think I saw one of the gulls occasionally depart from a
strict two-step, left-right-left-right tap on the ground. I’m not sure, but I believe
I saw one sometimes give two taps with its right foot, then one tap with its
left foot for a few meters. Was this again the kind of elaboration that a
gambler carries forward when his red shirt doesn’t bring him the jackpot on
successive tries? Will this more complicated pattern eventually catch on with
the seagulls – and then be embellished more and more? If I were to come back to
Edinburgh in fifty years, would I see flocks of seagulls in the Princes Street
Park all executing intricate foxtrots, tangos, whole “Dancing With the Stars”
routines? Will the world be witnessing a progression among Edinburgh’s seagulls
– from superstition, to myth, to ritual, to religion?
I took a video of the Dancing
Seagulls. But I see other people have posted better videos on YouTube, complete
with River Dance musical accompaniment. You can check it out at:
Youtube.comwatch?v=2QsqeHtRmHl
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