After years of assuming that animals spoke a universal language, I got a surprise today when I read a story about a high-tech gadget used to chase away the birds at an airport in Beijing. It seems that the Chinese, rather than go the traditional route of stuffing an old shirt and a pair of pants with straw and fashioning a head out of an old feed bag and hanging it up on a fence to scare away the birds, used a more modern method. They bought a devise from an American company that made noises to scare away the birds. The device mimicked the sound of birds in peril and the sounds of their natural enemies, which it seems is a very effective way of chasing away birds here in the U.S., but in Beijing, it didn’t work.
Apparently, the birds over there speak a different language and their predators talk differently, too. When the device was used the birds simply ignored it. They didn’t understand the language. I’m figuring if they had used another low-tech method like putting up a sign with the following lettering, the birds wouldn’t have reacted to it either.
NO BIRDS
Of course, they could have put up a sign with a drawing of a bird on it with a large red circle around the bird and a red line dividing the circle, approximately 45 degrees clockwise of 12 o’clock. I’m guessing the birds would not have reacted to that, either. I’m assuming that the low-tech method of having some Chinese peasants patrol the grounds and shout epithets at the birds and wave their rakes and fists had been tried and failed, also.
If you have ever been close to an airport and not inside the terminal building, you are probably aware that the sound of jets coming and going would scare away about any kind of living creature. If you were a bird and had the natural ability to elevate yourself into a position where you could be sucked into the engines of a jet, ground to a paste and incinerated into a couple of insignificant motes of dust in a split second, it would seem to me that you would be wary of airports. One could offer the argument that the high-tech devices may not have been effective because the birds couldn’t hear them over the sounds of the planes.
However, the story went on to say that when the bird sounds were translated into Chinese that the birds understood and booked it out of there. I’ve worked for a couple of engineering companies where we made a high-tech product in our shop and when it was installed in the field, it didn’t do what it was supposed to. When that happened we always sent some guy out to the field and he stuck some bubble gum on it in a critical place, or sprayed some WD-40 on it or hit it with a large adjustable wrench, and then it worked fine. I guess the bird-scaring device just needed a little tweaking. It’s amazing what engineering and technology can do, providing there is some guy at the end of it all who will stoop over, expose the upper part of the crack of his ass to the light, and make it all work.
I can see it now. The field service guy comes to the airport and a dozen Chinese technicians greet him when he arrives at the equipment. The one who speaks English tells him the problem. He bends down and opens the control panel (the midday sun illuminates the flesh of his lower back and upper buttocks in the gap between his shirt and pants).
“I think we have a language problem here,” he says.
The technician translates to his group and much discussion ensues among them. He returns his attention to the field service guy.
“You mean Cobol, java, Linux?” he asks.
“Somethin’ like that.”
The field service guy twists a multi-way switch inside the control panel to a setting that says “Chinese.”
“That’ll do her,” he says.
Immediately the sky darkens much as it must have been when the Passenger Pigeons filled the sky in times of old, as the birds immediately begin to leave the airport area.
The field service guy closes the control panel door and wipes it with a shop towel.
“My work here is done,” he says. Then adds, almost as an afterthought, “Any of you fellers tell me where a guy could get some donuts?”
Because in the real world, and in Jimbo’s world, too, if you want to scare some birds, you need a guy who knows the language.
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