Sublime

Accounts by philosophers Ilhan Inan and Lani Watson, for example, characterize curiosity as an individual motivation to find out a specific referent or to acquire certain epistemic goods, respectively.

One little bird, however, performs a migratory feat reminiscent of birds’ wintering-on-the-moon days: starting out from Alaska, the blackpoll warbler flies three thousand miles east to Nova Scotia. There he gorges himself on webworms and sawflies and gets fat while waiting for a strong northwest wind to blow him off his twig out over the Atlantic O

If they want to sleep, they do so while airborne. That is highly risky, of course, because sleeping birds aren’t in total control of their actions. And so they spiral upward a mile or more to increase the distance between themselves and the ground. Then they begin to glide downward, tracing a wide circle that slows their descent. Finally, they are

Chris had followed the flight of a purple martin (Progne subis)