SQUATTERS AND LANDLORDS
I was watching YouTube, of course, when, with mounting empathy, I became engrossed in an outdoor drama. A gorgeous, sensuous Egyptian goose was being confronted, beak and claw, by an irate family of royal storks. The intensity of the dispute was such that I began to tremble in my seat, my skin shifting colors like the tumescent black-violet caruncles of an overexcited turkey. A cold perspiration followed. At first, as is often the case, I understood nothing—until a divine light struck my vortex.
The Principal has His ways. Far from being a mere witness to a tedious, perennial conflict between squatters and landlords, I was privileged to attend a clash worthy of Seven Against Thebes. 
Here the antagonists were the avian counterparts of Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polynices—both innocent and guilty, yet both driving inexorably toward a “final solution.” Such plots, stamped with the mark of genius, serve as touchstones for sensitive souls who indulge in ethical reflection.
Let us observe the facts without taking sides. Upon the raised rim of a particularly wide and clumsy stork’s nest, a dandy Egyptian goose lands. She casts a deprecatory glance at the dilapidated bottom of the den, where a cluster of eggs lies in apparent disorder. She settles upon them, though she cannot cover them entirely.”Aha,” I thought, “another case of compulsive motherhood and adoption—an avian Angelina Jolie.”
Before I could fully appreciate my own wit, the landlord arrived: long black legs, a sharp red beak, wrapped within a white and black feathered mantle—an elegant royal stork of the highest order. Would there be blood? No. The protagonists kept their distance and avoided eye contact, each affecting ignorance of the other’s presence. Then, tentatively, the mighty bullfrog-eater extended its interminable neck and dagger-like beak toward the lady, who seemed protected only by her maternal composure.
It was grave mistake.
The outraged brooder dashes forward with startling ferocity—so they were her eggs after all?—and charged the “royal,” who retreated in ignominious flight. I was on the verge of shouting my admiration when the roughneck returned, accompanied by his partner and their two fully grown brats. Cowardly as a pack, the entire gang launched a sustained assault on the brave single mother until they succeeded in driving her from the nest.
It happened as such things often do in real life.
I was contemplating my departure from so melancholy a spectacle when the villainous victors broke into the most extraordinary combination of breakdance-cum-music (clattering I suppose) imaginable. It seemed, after all, that art has little to do with morality or correctness—though perhaps we should keep that observation discreet.
As I ruminated on my own fossilized assumptions, 
the goose returned, this time accompanied by an athletic alpha male gander. She has a partner after all? His mere presence was enough to send the gang of four into panic. They abandoned the nest in haste and, apparently, for good.
The Aeschylus brand of confrontation between the two feathered antagonists who are both innocents and guilty, the stork being the landlord of the nest, while the lady goose the owner of the holly eggs, takes an epitomical value within its ultra-realist natural setting. More nature you cannot get. The finale, of course, is a matter of power.
Perhaps we have now reached the source of the sly Greek playwright’s inspiration and may conclude that nature is the mother of wisdom and the origin of all sins. Why not?
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