One day in 2003 I was walking through a bird market in Jakarta, Indonesia. I had been rehabbing raptors and taking in unwanted exotic pet birds for along time but that did not prepare me for this market place. I could not travel thousands of miles from Texas and not visit an open air market in thee center of a huge city on thee island of Java between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, just north of Australia.
People in other countries have a very different sense of personal space than most American, so to describe a crowded tropical market is something you have to experience to appreciate. There were no real isles through the market but there were narrow paths. Vendors and their families would grab at my clothes to get my attention and buy whatever they were selling. There were tropical birds I didn’t recognize, in stick baskets or loose on stands.
The rice farmers used geese to weed the rice paddies and so there were lots of chickens and geese for sale along with the exotics. There were rice paddies outside my room and every morning and evening the geese would walk out into the water covered fields to eat the weeds around the rice plants. Geese just ate the new growth weeds. The farmer was not with them all day as they moved from field to field. It was fascinating to watch. We so underestimate birds and how we can work together.
