Don’t you forget that the reason you fly is to eat.”
This flying business is all very well, but you can’t eat a glide, you know.
Richard bach how to#
If you must study, then study food, and how to get it. Boats will be few and the surface fish will be swimming deep. “See here Jonathan” said his father not unkindly. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can’t, that’s all. “I don’t mind being bone and feathers mom. “Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can’t you leave low flying to the pelicans, the alhatross? Why don’t you eat? Son, you’re bone and feathers!” When he began sliding in to feet-up landings on the beach, then pacing the length of his slide in the sand, his parents were very much dismayed indeed. His glides ended not with the usual feet-down splash into the sea, but with a long flat wake as he touched the surface with his feet tightly streamlined against his body. He didn’t know why, for instance, but when he flew at altitudes less than half his wingspan above the water, he could stay in the air longer, with less effort. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting. This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one’s self popular with other birds. Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight-how to get from shore to food and back again. To stall in the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor.īut Jonathan Livingston Seagull, unashamed, stretching his wings again in that trembling hard curve-slowing, slowing, and stalling once more-was no ordinary bird. Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall. Then his featliers ruffled, he stalled and fell. He narrowed his eyes in fierce concentration, held his breath, forced one. The curve meant that he would fly slowly, and now he slowed until the wind was a whisper in his face, until the ocean stood still beneath him. A hundred feet in the sky he lowered his webbed feet, lifted his beak, and strained to hold a painful hard twisting curve through his wings.
It was another busy day beginning.īut way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing. and the word for Breakfast Flock flashed through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls came to dodge and fight for bits of food. A mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water. It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.