moon_custafer: matching nail varnish and rubber tentacle (Tentacle)
TIL that flamingos are among the species of birds that can secrete a substance analogous to milk from the linings of their crops*, and that flamingo milk is blood red in colour, making the process falsely appear rather gory (google “flamingo milk” with caution if you’re squeamish). It contains the same stuff that makes their feathers pink, and the colour drains out of the parents during the months they feed their young this way.  

Anyway the first thing that came to mind after I read this was the medieval legend about pelicans feeding their chicks on their own blood— usually this gets explained as “people saw pelicans preening and thought they were stabbing themselves,” but now I wonder if this belief originated with flamingos and a mistranslation occurred somewhere along the way. I tried googling “pelicans medieval blood flamingoes” to see if anyone else had raised this possibility, and apparently somebody did in 1869.


* The others that can are: all doves and pigeons; and penguins, but only Emperor penguins, and probably just the males. None of these groups are closely related, which suggests that not only did they evolve lactation independently from mammals, but also independently from each other.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (acme)
Some time after three this afternoon, I looked up to see a bird crash into one of our showroom windows, from the inside. It picked itself up and flapped around, hurling itself against the windows again. It was a starling, or a grackle; I can never remember which is which. I don't think it was a psychopomp.

I propped open the front door, and tried to capture the bird or shoo it out, but it just flew to whatever side of the room I wasn't on. I tried to lure it with cookie crumbs, but it didn't care. Its beak was open. Perhaps it was panting. I went back to my desk. After a while the bird perched on top of a refrigerator. Every so often it would tap the metal grill with its beak.

Mary went home for the day. Mary Ann hadn't come in today (migraine). Udi had been oblivious to the bird from the start. After a while the bird flew over to one of the gas barbecue grills and pecked at some of the crumbs I'd left there. I went and got another cookie, crumbled it and made a trail of crumbs leading from the corner where the bird was to the open door. Then I sat at my desk.

After a few minutes, I saw the bird on the carpet pecking at the crumbs. A few minutes later, it was halfway to the door, then out the door. I got up and closed the door behind it, and picked the leftover crumbs out of the carpet.

Spring?

Feb. 26th, 2014 09:01 am
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (thor tricked me)
It's at least -20 C this morning, but I saw a robin when I was on my way in to work. Not a particularly happy robin (camped out under a shrub, feathers ruffled and looking less than thrilled with the circumstances), but a robin nonetheless.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (covetin)
Busy night’s dreaming – a lot of dreams within dreams, or dreams about movies, which I subsequently recounted to people in later dreams. The first part that I can recall involved seeing a trailer for what appeared to be a low-brow comedy: a man was scattering his late mother’s ashes while wearing a speedo; another man woke up in bed next to an old man who shouted at his that he was going to be late for class; someone said it was better than it looked, and that it was actually an adaptation of a series of satirical SF tales from a few decades ago. The shouting old man was the other man’s professor, his appearance part of a device called the “Self-Referential Alarm Clock” which wakes you with flash-forwards of stuff happening later in the day that you’ll miss if you don’t get up.

Subsequent dream imagery – a trio whose drummer was a cat (he was good, but not very loud – you really had to listen hard to hear his solos); two koalas the size of adult humans (scary); handful_ofdust’s son was picking up kitty litter gravel and putting it in his mouth, so not knowing what else to do, I held him upside down so it would fall back out. Another movie, with a plot involving some kind of Faustian bargain: the Devil was played by James Earl Jones as an old-time medicine-show huckster, in a bravura performance that I kept telling everyone about for the rest of the dream. He was also selling some kind of health-insurance scheme that involved sending purchasers back to the 1990s, when gym memberships were apparently cheaper than they are now.


Waking – just before reaching work I came across a fledgling sparrow in the parking lot at the corner. One leg was dragging, and the fledgling was crawling across the asphalt by pushing itself along on its wings, towards the adults who appeared to be chirping encouragement from the tailgate of a parked truck. I watched for a while, unsure what to do. I’d learned recently that many birds leave the nest before they can fly, and live on the ground for a while, still under the care of their parents; for this reason you should not automatically try to rescue them or return them to their nests. The dragging leg worried me, but I’ve seen plenty of one-legged birds. I just wasn’t sure that the wings and the other legs worked. When the wind blew the fledgling off-course, however, I gave in, picked it up and carried it to the truck it had been trying to reach, figuring it was safer there than in the middle of the lot. www.helpbabybirds.ca, which I checked when I got into work, reassured me that even uninjured fledglings push themselves along on their wings like that when they first leave the nest, but I’ll probably go check the area at lunch time. In any case the website implies the local wildlife rehab are too overwhelmed to take songbirds.

ETA -- Nope. Dead where I left it. Now I wish I'd been brave enough to put it out of its misery when I found it. So hard to know what to do with live things.

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