One of my favorite films growing up was a movie called, "Fly Away Home." In the story, a young girl moves to Canada to live with her father, and there she finds a group of abandoned goose eggs. She takes it upon herself to care for these eggs and make sure they hatch accordingly. As the goslings hatch, she comes to find that they have taken her to be their "mother." This is a standard psychological concept come to be known as "imprinting." The young geese become largely fixated on the first large, moving object they see after hatching. In this case, the little girl was this object; therefore the little geese followed her everywhere. In the movie, the geese must migrate south or they will not survive the winter, but they do not have a real goose mother to follow south. The little girl takes advantage of the imprinting and builds a flying device that the geese follow, and they make it successfully south for the winter.
In this clip, at :58 seconds imprinting is described, and it is shown throughout the clip how the goslings attached themselves to her. In this film however, it seems as though the girl attached herself to the geese in a manner similar to how they attached themselves to her; she became there mother as much as they thought she was.
Although it is hard to say whether imprinting will lead to a flock of geese following a flying contraption shaped like a goose, the concept of imprinting in the movie is accurately portrayed. When the goslings hatch, they immediately attach themselves to the young girl, making her the "mother goose." I would like to see if imprinting would go so far in real life as to see if baby geese would follow a plane if they did in fact imprint on it.
Its interesting to see that geese will not only imprint upon their mother, but that they will imprint on anything that they see in the first few hours of their lives. It goes to show that interpersonal relationships are very important if not essential to most creatures, even if they are not as abrupt or strong as geese.
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