Fly Away Home

This week, we learned a lot about how infants develop through the lifespan. One thing the book talked about was imprinting. Imprinting is the process by which certain animals forma attachments during a critical period very early in life. One example the book gave was Konrad Lorenz who hatched ducklings do see what would happen if he was the first moving thing they saw once they hatched. The ducklings followed him around everywhere he went. This showed that although birds imprint the best with their own kind, they can also imprint to many moving objects like other animals or even a bouncing ball. While I was reading this section in the book, I remembered a movie I would watch with my grandma when I was five or six.

The movie was called "Fly Away Home" and it was about a girl who gets in a car accident with her mother. The mother died and the little girl, Amy, goes to live with her father who is an inventor in Canada. While living with her father, developers begin tearing up the local forest behind their house and Amy discovers an abandoned Canada Geese nest. Amy takes the eggs home with her and decides to care for them. Once they hatch, they act like Amy is their mother. They follow her everywhere and she feeds them and teaches them how to do things. After realizing what his daughter has done, he contacts the locals to ask for advice on what to do. He is told that the geese he has are fine right now, but they will want to try to migrate south for the winter. The problem with this is that they do not know how to fly. The father decides to invent a sort of hang glider that looks like a giant goose to fly it in front of the geese in hopes that they will learn from it and be able to fly south for the winter. The ending always makes me cry, but in a good way..