Episode 2 in “Things You Can Learn from Working with Animals,” a Kaleidoscopic Contemplations mini-series:

Birds Don’t Need Calculus

It may seem odd for an English teacher to talk about Calculus, but I haven’t always been an English teacher.  In fact, at one point, I was – gasp!—a Biology major.  While this is neither the time nor place to discuss the interesting chain of events which led from Bio major to English teacher, I mention this as an explanation for how I ended up in a Life Science Calculus 2 class, with an assignment to “Write an equation which applies Calculus to the real world.”

Having always been more language-minded than math-minded, I was slightly overwhelmed by the assignment.  The project required that I find an expert in my field who could approve the project (confirm that it had real-life relevance), so I decided to utilize my experience with animals.  For years, I had been volunteering as a bird trainer at the local zoo’s bird show, so I decided to create an equation to plot the trajectories of bird flight paths, with the goal of figuring out when and where to release two different birds in order to have them meet mid-air at a certain location.

And so I began my project.  I will spare you most of the brain-bleeding details, but in the end, I completed the equation just before my brain imploded from exhaustion – it was nearly 10 pages.  10 pages … of math.

For those of you unfamiliar with Calculus, let me just say that it is not uncommon for a Calculus equation to be many pages in length.  They are very complex equations, with multiple steps in the process.  However, in spite of its normality in the Calculus world, when it comes down to it, my project was still just, well, 10 pages of math…which, for someone as right-brained as me, was a bit unsettling.

So then came the test – could it be applied to the real world?  

I took my project proudly to the lead animal trainer for the bird show at the zoo, and explained it to him.  He looked through it, very impressed, then said:

“This is wonderful, but we would never use Calculus for this.  We’d just use trial and error.”

In all honesty, I wasn’t very surprised at his response.  After all, why use a complicated Calculus equation when you can jump directly to the practical application?  The birds had been flying in the show for years without the aid of higher-level math.

In the end, he signed off on my project as “applicable to the real world,” and I turned it in to my Calculus professor, with full knowledge that my beautiful math might have been “applicable,” but not practical.

So what can be learned from all of this?  In my mind, this breaks down into 2 basic lessons:

If a problem can be fixed simply, be thankful!  There’s no need to spend countless hours writing 10 pages of math to figure out a problem that could have been solved with 30 minutes of trial and error.  I think this applies to many things in life, from relationships to minor day to day situations; deal with the issue at hand, fix the problem however it can be fixed, and don’t worry about the “math” behind it.

    2.   Birds don’t need calculus.

Put simply, nature balances it itself.  If a bird needs to fly, it will fly.  Birds don’t need to understand the math behind their flight trajectories in order to learn a behavior and perform it correctly.  They learn the behavior because they get rewarded for doing so; they fly because they are designed to fly; and they never bother with understanding the physics or mathematics of any of it.   People, on the other hand, often suffer from the “Can’t see the forest for the trees” Syndrome – we get so stuck on details or analysis that we miss the beauty of simple application.

Don’t get me wrong, science and math are incredible tools for learning, and they can help us to understand so much about the world we live in.  But sometimes, we need a reminder that while we’re pondering the science of bird flight, the birds are out there flying.

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