We were staying in a very nice "home stay" that had rice fields behind it. We had a habit of taking our morning coffee outside to watch the sunrise. (For twenty five cents you could get a boy with a long bamboo pole to keep the monkeys from stealing your food.) We started watching what appeared to be a very old man planting rice in flooded fields. For many days, he spent hours, bent over plugging rice shoots. One morning he was not in the fields and we spotted him at a distance herding a small gaggle of geese to his newly planted rice fields. Geese are grazers and prefer new growth.

Jim and I were on a walking tour of the island of Bali in Indonesia, which is north of Australia. I heard there was a bird market and could not resist. There were birds there from all over the Indonesian islands and many I had never seen before. The exchange rate, when we were there, was 10,000 to 1 US dollar. To say things were cheap is an understatement. Chickens and pigeons were sold as food and the rest as pets. It was a crowded dirty market but surprisingly the birds looked healthy. I would imagine they were all wild caught, but the language barrier prevented me from asking questions.