If you think Red Bull gives you wings, or that buying a GoPro makes your life awesome, I think these tiny little gosling chicks have something to tell you: Mother Nature doesn’t need that for thrills. Look at them ‘base jump’ off a 120m cliff ‘without a parachute’ and hit the side of the mountain and still survive.
Damn. This footage was captured in David Attenborough’s Life Story which shows a bunch of barnacle goslings in their nest on a cliff in Greenland. The geese parents are 120m down below and are encouraging the chicks to make the jump, I mean, this is a twisted game of survival they’re playing here. Stay up there on the rocky cliffs and you can’t eat grass, jump and you might die (you can’t fly either).
They’re going to hit the side of the cliff (as you’ll see in the video), but as the BBC writes:
Without robust wings necessary to fly down the cliff, the newly hatched goslings’ best chance is a lucky parachute-style drop. How the chicks land is the ultimate decider of life or death.
If the chicks bounce on their fluffy bellies on the way down, they are more likely to survive the impacts. They must be reunited with their parents on the scree slope below — then evade hungry predators.