(A version of this essay was published in Minnesota Medicine in March, 2005.)

The first snowy egret I ever saw was standing in a shallow pool, a beautiful white creature with a wispy headdress floating in a gentle breeze. When he lifted off, trailing his long black legs, I was startled by a flash of bright yellow – he looked like he was wearing a child’s rubber boots, designed to hug a bird’s clawed feet. He did a loop around the pond in  flying low in a peculiar, non-aerodynamic position. His legs hung down rather than stretching out parallel to his body. He dipped closer to the water and his dangling yellow feet brushed the surface. He’s landing, I thought. But he didn’t. He repeated the maneuver four times.  He’s afraid to land, I thought. But then he touched down with hardly a splash, and dipped his beak to catch a fish, then another, and another. In a moment of bird-watching epiphany, I realized that his feet were like a fisherman’s lure. He’d rounded up his lunch. 

I looked around the pond. I’d just watched a bird with bright yellow feet use them to attract the curiosity of his prey. Across the water was a bird with a lower bill that expanded into a pouch to collect fish as he skimmed, openmouthed, over the water. Perched high above was another, just about to dine on a large fish he’d  skewered with  fearsome talons. What an impressive display of diversity!  If people were this diverse, New England fishermen would grow waterproof, blubber lined hands, typists would develop extra fingers, and mothers really would have eyes in the backs of their heads.  

But people are pretty much the same as far as their bodily equipment goes.  Five fingers on each of two hands, ten toes divided between two feet, two eyes, upright posture, and a narrow range of physical abilities, notwithstanding the spread between ordinary and Olympian. The traits we associate with human diversity are superficial – hair color and texture, skin color, facial appearance. Almond shaped or round, eyes still see. Long, elegant skeletal frames and short squat ones all support bodies against the universal force of gravity. Skin pigmentation protects the body covering from the sun, more or less depending on the power of the sun in the areas of the world where the people originated. We are much more like each other than we are different in our biology. The birds have it all over us in the diversity contest.  

After my egret experience, I packed up my binoculars, got on my bike and headed home, humbled a little by the thought that all of the talk and concern about diversity among people is overblown, maybe just another representation of man’s abiding sense of self-importance. But along the way I passed bikes and cars, houses and stores, a radio broadcast tower, and a museum.  I crossed a bridge between two islands and waved to a fisherman in his boat. And I realized that each of these man made things  I passed began as an idea, somewhere, some time, in somebody’s head. We might not differ much in anatomy and physiology, but no two of us have identical thoughts. The mind is the site of the real diversity among humans. The mind is plastic and ever developing. It records, collates, recalls, communicates, and combines unrelated information in new ways. Yellow feet catch the eye, but minds change the world.