Ear Hairs & Dove Instinct

I’ve fought unsightly ear and nose hair my whole life. I remember an older, round little man I worked with in New York when I was a pup of twenty-two. He had a long, thick hair growing out of the tip of his nose, not from either nostril but from the very end of his nose. It was impossible to speak to him without one’s eyes drawn irresistibly to that hair. Was he blind to its presence? Was it invisible to him whenever he looked in a mirror? Did he choose to ignore it out of some hirsute pride?  Or did he think it was impossible to pluck such a long, tough hair? How do such hairs grow and why would they be part of our creator’s plan for mankind? ‘Tis a mystery.

The other day as I was driving to the grocery store, the morning sun was shining from my left. In the rearview mirror, I could see in the sunlight a hair about an inch long growing out of my left ear.  How is that possible?  I pull ear hairs religiously and this one somehow escaped my view.  Or is it that these hairs just grow like Jack’s beanstalk overnight?  I wonder what would happen if I just let them grow.  Would they get long enough to braid?  Would I look like a werewolf?  Or would they, as I see them on some men, just get darker and darker and thicker and thicker until their ear holes become vine-covered cave entrances.  No wonder so many men here have to wear hearing aids.

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We have many doves that live in and around our backyard. The one I best remember was a mother who, in our sickly orange tree, chose to build her little stick nest to the north side of our back patio. We could watch her as her two eggs hatched and then as she sat on her tiny offspring between feedings, rolling her eyes at us and pretending she was invisible. Once, when I was out in back and got too close to her orange tree home, she took off and gave me that injured bird bit, where she fluttered across the ground looking for all the world like really easy prey.  And that led me to consider where and how that behavior got started.  I know all about instinct and how its knowledge is passed on genetically.  But there would also have to be some kind of avian reasoning going on at one time or another.  Sometime in the past, a dove must have seen another dove, actually injured, and doing an excellent although unwitting job of luring a predator away from her young.  And the light went on over his/her head.  “Ah ha!  What a good idea.  I could fake it and accomplish the same thing.”  And thus was born the acting job that became instinctive in the breed.  But it first had to involve some reasoning.  A little bird brain that could put one and one together.  Granted, he wasn’t yet up to putting 1309 and 1246 together.  But that could come generations and generations later.  Just as it must have with humans.