Wings and Things

When I was a boy I was fortunate enough to live on a property that had this magnificent dam a couple of hundred meters from our front yard (That is the bank of the dam in the middle of the photo and you can see the water on the right). The windmill on the bank supplied the house with water. When the dam was full it held 50,000 cubic yards of water which in to-days metric measurements is 40 Mega litres. It was massive and had very large areas of reeds on the right of the photo. The dam was constructed about 1880 by bullock drays that carted the soil from an 11,000 Cubic yard escavation.

We children spent many wonderful hours paddling around in the shallows looking at the eggs in the Dog bird’s nests and admiring how God had created them with brown markings on the shells so they were cleverly camouflaged. We covered our heads with waterweed and were able to swim close to the ducks, swans and pelicans and admire their waterproof feathers and wonderful webbed feet (so cleverly designed for what they had to do). The Snipes, Ibis and Dog birds didn’t need any waterproofing for their feathers because they had long legs and long beaks so they could wade in the shallows, and reach down in the water for food without even

getting their eyes wet (marvellous designs). The Ibis foraged in the deeper water as they had longer legs and longer beaks, further out, where the water was too deep for the Ibis, was the Ducks domain. Still further out the Swans enjoyed themselves and the Pelicans chased the Murray Cod fish that dad had introduced to the dam from the Darling River.

 Seeing all these birds so wonderfully designed and outfitted for their place in the scheme of things helped us appreciate the incredible mind of our creator God. Indeed the more we saw of them the more we marvelled, for example if a duck had ducklings and we went near them the parent would run a couple of meters away and flap around as if it had a broken wing and if we went near to pick it up it would “recover” just enough to run or fly another couple of meters and then repeat the same deception as before. This pretence would continue until we were well away from the ducklings at which time the duck would fly away. Obviously God, who designed her, programmed her to behave like that as she could never have figured it out herself. Then there was the “Diver” which is a tiny replica of a swan with a body no bigger than a cricket ball. This delightful little water bird makes a floating nest about the size of a dinner plate out of grass and weeds and lays its eggs in a dent on top, however if you approach it she will stand up and very quickly cover the eggs with waterweed and stomp it down, having done that she dives into the water and swims below the surface for about five meters. Then she comes up and watches until you have moved on. Here again I just marvel at the God who thought of everything when He programmed them.

There were lots of insects there too; one of my favourites was, and still is, the Dragon Fly. I took this photo of one that collided with my car the other day:  

If, as some suggest, this insect designed itself well it must be an Aeronautical Engineer to have got the wings right, and be an Industrial Chemist to have invented the clear plastic type material to cover the wings, and it must have a laboratory somewhere to put all this together. As well it can fly at speed or adjust its wings to hover. Frankly I find it easier to believe the bible that says God, with Jesus as “the word of God”, made all this on the week of creation (John1:3) and according to Jesus (John3:15&16) if we don’t “believe” we “perish.” Confronting isn’t it?  Anyway think it through. Best wishes,  Tom.