Birds an Evolutionary Perspective :-
Birds as we know today were not always these pretty generally harmless creatures that make nests in our gardens. Birds evolved from something more fierce - dinosaurs. By analyzing fossils found all over the world scientists have concluded that dinosaurs were the ancestors of the birds we see around us today.
 |
| Source - Hallet Bird evolution |
As we can see in the picture above how evolution would have done its job. Flying food can be easily caught if you can fly too, teeth become useless, develops a beak for catching food, food leads to survival which leads to have dominance on other counterparts. Natural selection at its best. This is better explained in the image below.
 |
| Source- Understanding Evolution |
So now that we all know that how the beautiful birds we see everyday came into existence. Lets look at the family of birds we are interested in - the Ardeidae. Ardeidaes or Herons are a family of birds with long legs and are usually found near the coastlines. The white heron as we had in our story is a majestic creature.
 |
| Source - White Heron |
A white heron is a perfect example of evolution - thin long legs to walk in shallow water, long pointed beak sharp enough to catch fish. The white heron is a result of millions of years of gradual evolution and natural selection.
(Here's a funny video
Animals and Humans :-
The most dangerous, murderous, destructive and ignorant species on the planet - Homo Sapiens or Humans in lay man terms is an animal himself. Humans are one of the few self aware animals and maybe the smartest animal to inhibit the Earth ever yet we still harm other animals. In this day and age we have forgotten that we are just smart apes on a biological spaceship called earth going through the universe at a really high speed. Yes we are apes. I don't care if you believe that there is an ever loving invisible man/women or a group of them in the sky that created us different from all other animals. The truth however bitter it maybe is that we are just a few percent different than apes.As animals some of us have wings, some of us have four legs but we are all a big weird family.
 |
| Source - Tree of life |
Looking at the the tree of life you can see that the first member in our family was the single celled organism in water a few billion years ago, some of his cousins went on to become plants and some became fish and other animals. The most curious member of this family was a fish one of our great grandfathers. He ventured onto land and gave rise to land animals. These land animal cousins then took on the terrain and evolved according to them. Our ancestors were something like moneys. Imagine two cousins one of them went on give rise to chimpanzees and the other gave rise to early man. The chimpanzees possibly had an environment where they lived on trees and early man lived in caves. Slowly and steadily man lost its monkey like abilities. Think of it like if you don't go to the gym for a million years you will be a different man than one who does.
The final argument :-
What is my argument here ?. Well all I am saying if we are all animals with a common grandparent fish then why the fish are we killing our own family. We should stop acting like spoiled brat that we humans are and start treating our far off cousins and family member whether they are rats, birds or tigers right. Lets stop killing our own family. Lets learn to live with our differences or we will soon be the only lonely species in this part of the galaxy.
Connecting the dots :-
How does this relate to the " The White Heron "?. Like in the story the kid lives with the wild animals and loves them unconditionally. She even sacrificed the chance to get appreciation of the Hunter that she admired to save the Heron's life. I am just saying that lets all of us be like that child. Lets learn to love our big huge family rather than just a tiny little part of it. Lets learn to respect the earth and its gifts. Lets learn to take responsibility of conserving the earth, its animals and its beauty before its all gone. There is no one waiting for us to screw up and then will come save us. It is us who decides if this planet will come to an end or not. To conclude everything here is a quote to take away
“The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What’s our excuse?”.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
