Birdy movie review: Fly Away Home

Last night, Em and I watched one of our favorite movies, Fly Away Home. In the movie, 13-year-old Amy discovers a nest of Canada goose eggs, abandoned when developers come into a marsh and start mowing down trees. She raises the geese, and then she and her father attempt to lead them southward for fall migration.

There are lots of cute shots of the goslings following the actress who plays Amy (Anna Paquin, whom I like a lot), bathing with her, and just being sweet baby geese. The cinematography and the music are beautiful, and it’s a great film for anyone who loves birds and feel-good movies. The movie also stars Jeff Daniels and Dana Delany (whom I've had a crush on since her work on China Beach).

I had always thought that the movie plot was pretty much all true, complete with cute kid befriending and leading the geese, but it's actually based on the efforts of an artist-inventor-pilot named Bill Lishman, who first taught geese and then whooping cranes and trumpeter swans to follow a migratory path by flying with the birds in an ultra-light aircraft. He's a lot like the Jeff Daniels character in the movie, but there is no teenage daughter in real life, which means that the tale I heard a few years ago, that the girl had died in a ultra-light accident, wasn’t true! (I'm kinda relieved about that.) Lishman started Operation Migration to continue his efforts to help endangered birds. Check out his efforts by following that link. Pretty cool.