Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

After roe, women are no longer free.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

It’s a doggy dog world.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

This fight is for everything.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

I really should read my own blog.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

You are here: Home / Pet Blogging / This is the Dream

This is the Dream

by | 134 Comments

This post is in: 

I know my posts have been few and far between the past two weeks, and it’s because I am working through some shit and dealing with a lot of stuff. However, I give you this gift: The Altitude Birdie Cafe:

This is the Dream

Apparently a woman in Australia a while back moved into a new apartment in a high rise building, and one day she was sitting on the patio and a Cockatoo flew up. It hung out for a while, and she gave it a nut. Cockatoo’s are smart, so it came back for more. And then it kept coming back, and started bringing friends. She fed them treats, too.

And now, every day, starting at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, she has a constant stream of Cockatoos and Lorikeets who come and visit her and she feeds them a metric ton of almonds because they are good for the birds and the least messy nut out there. She has to be careful to close the patio door, or they just come into her house en masse. She has name them all, and one in particular is her BFF and comes in and hangs out with her and has house privileges.

You are welcome.

Reader Interactions

134Comments

  3. 3.

    trollhattan

    Birbs! Australia has cooler birds than the US and I’m not ashamed to admit that. These are over the top, even for Australia.

  4. 4.

    Hoosierspud

    One of my best friends lives in a high rise in Brooklyn. On September 11th, a cockatoo that was missing the feathers on his head showed up on the railing of his balcony. He and his husband took him in and posted online that they had found this bird. No one ever claimed him and they kept him as long as he lived. His missing feathers never grew back.

  6. 6.

    Rand Careaga

    Speaking of messes, I am given to understand that lorikeets are given to “projectile” defecation. Don’t linger in the sidewalk beneath that balcony.

  7. 7.

    Almost Retired

    A small murder of crows has lingered in the tree outside my bedroom window all week.  Perhaps they are attempting to noisily befriend me?   I have rebuffed them.  And yet, they remain.   Vociferous and incontinent.  My nightmares are full of caw caws.

    Maybe the incoming hurricane will blow them into Ventura County or something.

  8. 8.

    trollhattan

    @Almost Retired: ​
    Crows are winged rats. Also the predominant bird in our metroplex, triply so in winter when they pack into downtown trees to stay warm. Significant vector for west Nile virus, also, too.

  10. 10.

    S Cerevisiae

    Birds on the balcony, love it! I would feed the chickadees up north during the winter and they would be bold enough to land on my hand and eat sunflower seeds. They would also scold me if the feeders were empty. We didn’t feed them in the summer because bears.

  14. 14.

    trollhattan

    Current path prediction for Hilary is landfall tomorrow midday at the Pacific coast of Baja, then north through San Diego, passing east of LA towards the desert, then eventually into Nevada on Monday where I guess it will be down to a tropical depression, having been away from the ocean for a couple days.

    Hopefully it doesn’t spawn a bunch of thunderstorms in the mountains.

  26. 26.

    Doug R

    @Rand Careaga:

     

    Speaking of messes, I am given to understand that lorikeets are given to “projectile” defecation. Don’t linger in the sidewalk beneath that balcony.

    We lived in Victoria, BC for years when I was a kid:

    The Fairmont Empress in Victoria has lifted its ban against Nick Burchill — 17 years after dozens of seagulls trashed the Dartmouth, N.S., man’s hotel room while feasting on enough pepperoni to fill his suitcase.

    “I didn’t like the feeling of being banned from somewhere,” Burchill said. “So when I was out there last week for a different conference, I thought that I would approach The Empress and see if I could officially get my record cleared.”

    Burchill’s story began with good intentions. He was taking a small suitcase full of Brothers Pepperoni — a widely requested Halifax delicacy — to some of his navy friends in the B.C. capital.

    “It was a long flight, that time of the year where everyone travels, so the bag got lost, misplaced for a period of time,” said Burchill, who wrote a widely shared Facebook post about the ordeal.

    When the pepperoni finally arrived at the hotel, Burchill said he worried it would get warm because there was no fridge, so he laid the food out on a table near the window ledge and the chilly April air.

    “And that’s when things kind of went bad,” said Burchill.

    Burchill left the room for a few hours to take a walk. He returned to a room full of seagulls.

    “I don’t mean just a couple of seagulls. I can only estimate how many there were,” he said. “I’m thinking somewhere between 30 and 40 seagulls had come in through this open window while I was gone.

    “And I would have never thought of that because the East Coast seagulls aren’t that brazen. They’d never come into a room or do that sort of thing — at least I don’t think they would.”

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/seagulls-pepperoni-navy-fairmont-empress-1.4601675

  27. 27.

    Ken B

    Some researchers did an experiment about ten years ago. They caught and banded a bunch of crows and then released them.

    What made it an experiment was that they wore masks while they did it. Later they would go out and crows would scold  them if they were wearing the same mask.

    The crows remembered for years afterward, and taught other crows to recognize them as well.

  30. 30.

    Alison Rose

    @trollhattan: Hilarious you should say this, because in my Facebook memories today from 2018 was this:

    Was refilling the feeder and a hummingbird flew up and hovered near me for a few moments, like “Hurry up, damn it, I’m hungry!”

    I really miss having bird feeders, even if the birds weren’t always very polite.

  32. 32.

    Nukular Biskits

    @trollhattan:

    The absolute worst thunderstorm I have EVER ridden through on a motorcycle was, on/over of all places, Mt. Laguna east of San Diego.

    And that says a lot, given I’ve ridden in/through some pretty nasty stuff here on the MS Gulf Coast.

  34. 34.

    StringOnAStick

    This lady has figured out the best way to “have” large birds; all the joy, none of the cruelty and guilt.  As a woman who managed a bird rescue said to our group: “only humans would look at a gorgeous bird flying in the sky and think ‘I need to put that in a cage'”.  She said she took that job as penance for having bred and sold birds for many years.  Those white cockatoo are popular because for the first 10-15 years they can be very sweet (being a flock bird and gregarious by nature).  Then they reach sexual maturity and can become very dangerous towards anyone else in the house that they don’t think of as their mate.  They can also squawk at 130 decibles.  Her rescue operation was filled with birds that were once pets, became dangerous, and will now live for decades as too messed up to be released into the wild, too dangerous to be free close to any human who values the current arrangements of their facial structure.  Leave them in the wild where they belong!

  37. 37.

    Van Buren

    @Alison Rose: My mom always goes out a sliding glass door to fill her hummingbird feeders and if a feeder is empty birds will come hover by the door to let her know.

    They also hover at the door the day they return from Central America, usually April 30, to let her know she has work to do. It’s been going on for decades, so who knows how many generations have learned these behaviors.

  43. 43.

    Anoniminous

    In New Mexico we’re seeing hundreds of thousands of bird falling from the sky during the migration period due to exhaustion from starvation.  Tim Wright, a NMSU lead professor of the school’s aviation migration program has said, “these birds are literally the canaries in a coal mine for how human activities are impacting the natural world.”

  46. 46.

    StringOnAStick

    @Anoniminous: I just feel an overwhelming sense of sadness that we humans are seeing these signs all around us, and in order to make just tiny incremental progress to address this is such a struggle against the fascists.

  47. 47.

    trollhattan

    Simulated tough guy Ron Whiteshoes DeSantis wants you to know that unlike today, when he’s preznit we’ll be shooting people with fentanyl backpacks “stone cold dead” right there at the border, yo. No word on how one discerns which are the fentanyl backpacks.

    https://digbysblog.net/2023/08/19/stone-cold-dead/

    Erick Son of Erick has crafted hisself a teevee show. Bet he harvests tens of viewers.

  54. 54.

    kalakal

    Here’s your grudge bearing crows

    Corvids are scary smart, it still seems strange to not see magpies, rooks, and jackdaws here in Florida*, they were everywhere in Yorkshire. On the plus side I’ve fallen in love with Anhinga

    *Plenty of crows, jays and ravens

  56. 56.

    Anoniminous

    @StringOnAStick:

    The Four Stages of a Catastrophe:

    1.  Those scientists (sneer) don’t know what they are talking about

    2.  OK, they may know what they are talking about but it won’t be as bad as they say

    3.  Alright, it may be as bad as they say but it won’t happen here

    4.  WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY TELL ME THIS COULD HAPPEN?!?!?!

    With Global Warming and the resulting Global Weather Changes we’re still stuck at #1.

  59. 59.

    p.a.

    @Anoniminous: I believe the Fux News progression has been

    1.  Not happening
    2. Needs study
    3. May be happening, needs more study
    4. Happening, not human caused
    5. Happening, needs study re: human cause
    6. Human caused, but we’ll be better off
    7.  Maybe not better off but minimal inconveniences
    8. tRump elected
    9. Not happening but who gives a fuck anyway, the rich can insulate themselves from its effects.
  60. 60.

    BruceJ

    @trollhattan: Hummingbirds are straight up psychos We had one in my yard growing up that would divebomb us if we go too close to his blooming bottlebrush, which sucked because it occupied a large space near out back door. Finally mom hung up a feeder and he grudgingly tolerated our presence.

  61. 61.

    opiejeanne

    @zhena gogolia: Crows take baby bunnies if they spot the nest, and sometimes when the babies are just out of the nest a few days. The poor mother rabbits scream and cry and it’s heart-breaking.
    We managed to stop crows from raiding the ground nest of a pair of dark-eyed juncos in our garden, and all three nestlings fledged and survived, but we had to sit in the garden for a couple of hours until they all left, including the scout that was still hanging around in one of the pine trees at the edge of our lot. One of the parent birds sat above us in the cherry tree and clicked her outrage the whole time. In return, they kept the bugs off of our cabbage and bok choi.

  64. 64.

    CaseyL

    Wonderful story! For me, being in an area (or country) where birds which are exotic to the US are just regular native species, seeing them fly free and roosting wherever they want to, is a special thrill.

    Though I’m not sure I’d want my house to be a regular hangout for cockatoos. They’re not just talkative, they’re LOUD talkative. I mean, “hear them in the next county” loud.

  65. 65.

    CaseyL

    (Double post deleted – I’m not sure how it happened; I opened my comment to add something, and the old version stuck around.)

    John, I’m sorry to hear you’re going through a bad patch, and hope things improve.

  66. 66.

    Betty Cracker

    @Another Scott: Another weird bird fact: only about 3% of the approximately 10K bird species have dicks (males, obvs). I read that in a book called Bitch: On the Female of the Species, which is pretty good.

  67. 67.

    jonas

    A few years ago there was a story in the LA Times about a woman living in a remote mountain community north of LA whose back deck became a major gathering point for a huge flock of California condors for some reason. I forget how she encouraged them to eventually move on, but in the meantime boy, did they leave a mess.

  69. 69.

    kalakal

    I remember being quite surprised when I found out the standard transliteration of Owls hooting is really a double act

    “Then nightly sings the staring owl, / Tu-whit; / Tu-who.”

    It’s a call and response by Tawny Owls, the first bit is the female, the second the male. I always feel very sad when I hear a Tu-whit  followed by silence.

     

    @Betty Cracker: Nice photo, I love  watching them dry out with their wings spread

  71. 71.

    opiejeanne

    @jonas: It was near the SF Bay Area, and we had a neighbor several houses down when we lived in Castro Valley (the east bay) with the same problem. They would roost in the trees in her yard and crap all over her deck, and during mating season they screamed, sounding like a woman being murdered.

    One took a dump on my windshield as it flew over my car and I nearly crashed. It was like a bomb had gone off.

  76. 76.

    Glidwrith

    @Almost Retired: It was vividly brought home to me a few months ago why it is called a murder of crows. Just outside my office window I spotted one crow and two of its buddies. The one crow had a songbird pinned beneath its claws and was in the process of killing it.

    Everything needs to eat, but damn, I didn’t stay around to watch.

  78. 78.

    Roger Moore

    @Ken B:

    It’s apparently well known in ornithology circles that if you want to do something with crows that upsets them, especially investigating their nests, you need to wear a disguise while doing it.  If you don’t, the crows will recognize you and harass you wherever you go.

  81. 81.

    Lethe

    Lived in a cabin in Talkeetna, Alaska for 8 months. No roads, you flagged the local train and rode 15 miles up the tracks and then hiked in 3 miles. We had Ravens. With the capital R.

    Every Sunday morning we would make pancakes with enough batter left over to make two skillet sized pancakes for the ravens. They would walk around the yard impatiently until we brought them their treat. Nothing funnier than watching two ravens try to fly off with the same 14 inch pancake, or try to hide it from the other guy.

    Occasionally we would receive thank-yous: little shiny bits they had found and would leave on the porch. I really miss those days.

  84. 84.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @opiejeanne: are you sure you don’t mean Turkey Vultures? Condors are HUGE and quite rare. Pretty sure they don’t hang out in the East Bay, whereas TVs are pretty big and relatively common.

  85. 85.

    Roger Moore

    @kindness:

    My Australian peeps think cockatoos are noisy pests. I think they are magnificent.

    Familiarity breeds contempt.  I find the parrots in my neighborhood are beautiful, but they’re also obnoxious.  They travel in large flocks and raid fruit trees.  When they eat, they scatter far more food than they actually consume, so they are real pests.  They also poop everywhere, and they are amazingly loud.

  86. 86.

    M31

    was walking in my hood and started seeing and hearing more and more crows, all flying in the same direction, a while later I saw, in the street, a hawk had caught and pinned a crow to the ground, but was looking around really nervously as more and more loud cawing crows landed all around it and in the trees, there was a big standoff for the longest time and I eventually had to leave.

    So I didn’t see what happened but came back later and no sign of anything, neither crow nor hawk feathers or carcasses, so maybe the crows saved their friend, and I’m sure that hawk stuck to pigeons from then on

  87. 87.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @Roger Moore: I’ve read articles recently about peacocks in neighborhoods with that feeling. Gorgeous and at first everyone likes having them around, and then they squawk and shit everywhere and are a real nuisance.

  88. 88.

    Brachiator

    and it’s because I am working through some shit and dealing with a lot of stuff.

    I absolutely understand you here, brother.

  91. 91.

    Expletive Deleted

    There’s a family of crows on our road that I feed peanuts to, they’re too cautious to come very close for them, but the magpies sometimes will, there were jackdaws last year but not this one. I haven’t seen the corvids attack songbirds, although once they chased off a cat after the cat killed a blackbird.

    Its quite the nature documentary out of my home office window, really. Throughout the day you get a sequence of flocks passing through; a few fat pigeons in the morning, big loud flocks of starlings sweep through around ten, then blackbirds and sparrows hunting through the grass, followed a little later by the crow family doing a methodical follow through on the grass and also picking at any dropped litter for treats. Occasionally a loud flappy gull comes along, and if the crows are around they might chase the gulls out, but that’s fine by me.

  92. 92.

    Roger Moore

    @trollhattan:

    No word on how one discerns which are the fentanyl backpacks.

    I think the way law enforcement does this in practice is to keep a bunch of fentanyl around so they can plant it on the people they kill.  If someone is actually carrying fentanyl, the cops take most of it, some of it to plant on other suspects, some to sell, and some to use.

  95. 95.

    JaySinWA

    @Roger Moore:

    and some to use

    Don’t be silly, haven’t you seen those police videos of officers touching Fentanyl and nearly dying?  It’s like Kryptonite to them. /s

    They need moon suits to be around the stuff.

  96. 96.

    Roger Moore

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):

    I’ve read articles recently about peacocks in neighborhoods with that feeling.

    Yes, there’s a neighborhood near me that’s infested with peafowl*.  They are beautiful birds and are on the city seal, but the neighbors hate them.  They poop everywhere and raid people’s gardens.  Most annoyingly, they have a call that sounds like a child screaming for help that they love to make first thing in the morning.

    *The area around the LA County Arboretum, for anyone who cares.

  97. 97.

    Sister Golden Bear

    A group of Olds at the next table are earnestly discussing how Peruvian miners are being smuggled into Canada via jet packs to work in the gold mines up there. Jt packs….

    Not sure if I should laugh hysterically or weep.

    Must. Resist. Urge. To Check. Fox.

  101. 101.

    Brachiator

    @Betty Cracker:

    Another weird bird fact: only about 3% of the approximately 10K bird species have dicks (males, obvs).

    Here’s what birds have instead.

    Most male birds use their cloaca, a multi-purpose orifice used for both digestive excretion and reproduction, to mate.

    Male birds have the genetic coding for a penis, but the action of a specific gene known as Bmp4 prevents the development of a penis.

    BTW, chickens don’t have penises, but ducks do.

    Yeah, nature is weird.

     

    ETA. This knowledge is banned in Florida, Texas and selected red states. //

  102. 102.

    way2blue

    Ah.  Australia.  I remember sitting on a lawn at ANU waiting for a professor to return from lunch, and a couple Cockatoos flew by.  Whoa!  ‘They must have escaped from a zoo’, I told the professor when he arrived…   Australia.  Even the flies are a gorgeous shiny blue-black—as they coat your backpack…

  104. 104.

    Roger Moore

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    A group of Olds at the next table are earnestly discussing how Peruvian miners are being smuggled into Canada via jet packs to work in the gold mines up there. Jt packs….

    I think they probably got some news garbled.  There was a thing in the news recently about a gang of illegal gold miners in Peru who are using jetpacks as part of their attempts to terrorize the indigenous people.  I guess the illegal gold mines are lucrative enough that it’s worth going to crazy lengths to keep the locals intimidated and not interfering.  It sounds as if it feeds into local superstitions about flying humanoid beings.

  106. 106.

    Brachiator

    @Roger Moore:

    Yes, there’s a neighborhood near me that’s infested with peafowl*.

    A few years ago I got off the Gold Line train in Pasadena to meet a friend for lunch. There was a beautiful male peacock perched on a stone pedestal of a nearby apartment building, spreading his wings and preening. A couple of other peafowl were nearby. People were stopping their cars and creating a bit of a traffic tie up while they jumped out of their cars to take a picture.

    It was an oddly beautiful moment.

  109. 109.

    LiminalOwl

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): When I lived in Berkeley, I saw a therapist whose office looked out on a neighbor’s yard—with peacocks. The birds’ screams were especially disconcerting during sessions.

    Recommended watching: The Parrots of Telegraph Hill

    Recommended reading: “Kiss Your Hand to the Magpie” (short story by Joan Aiken)

  113. 113.

    Central Planning

    @trollhattan: I thought seagulls were the rats, not crows.

    A house at the end of my development has a woman outside in the early morning feeding seagulls. WTAF is wrong with her??

  114. 114.

    opiejeanne

    @Roger Moore: I knew you were talking about Arcadia or a neighboring town. I lived next door in Temple City when I was a teenager and knew about the lovely peacocks and their nasty ways. .

  116. 116.

    Pete Downunder

    Mrs Downunder and I live in a leafy suburb and she is the bird whisperer. There was a group of kookaburras (related to kingfishers) that would come by every day for a feed – they’re carnivores so our meat bill went up. One was particularly cheeky and decided he was a pet with house privileges and would come in a sit on her knee in the living room to be fed. We also had a slightly dysfunctional family of king parrots – the males have a bright red breast – that would come and screech for sunflower seeds. The male was not the most faithful of husbands and would occasionally bring his GF along with his wife. Arguments followed. We also had a juvenile butcher bird who would sit on her shoulder and try to steal her earrings. The birds here are amazing.

    I won’t discuss the carpet python that lives in our yard.

  117. 117.

    Pete Downunder

    There was also a story in the paper – it’s too early in the morning to find a link – about some cockatoos in Sydney that learned to open the wheelie bins and were teaching their friends. The contagion was spreading….

  119. 119.

    Brachiator

    @dmsilev:

    @Roger Moore: Someone at work had a previous job as staff at the Arboretum, and she had very little good to say about the peacocks.

    It may be that peacocks came with the territory. From Smithsonian Magazine.

    In California, the birds may be descendants of those imported from India in the 1870s by rancher Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin. The L.A. birds, called Indian peafowl or Pavo cristatus, are one of just three peafowl species in the world. …

    After Baldwin’s death in 1909, a portion of his 8,000-acre ranch—with about 100 peafowl that lived there—was made into the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden. Since then, peafowl in the surrounding area have dug up gardens, scratched children, pooped on cars and caused traffic jams.

    In many California locales, it is illegal to feed free roaming peacocks, but also illegal to kill them.

  120. 120.

    opiejeanne

    @Brachiator: I love that wave of the hand that after Lucky Baldwin’s death in 1909 his property became the arboretum. It was a few decades later, like 1947 when it was actually purchased to become the arboretum.

  122. 122.

    Another Scott

    @opiejeanne: A few years ago, a pair of grackles made a nest in one of our holly bushes.  A couple of cardinals did not like that – at all.  The cardinals camped out just a few feet away from the nest.

    I never saw any baby grackles.

    Nature is not kind.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  123. 123.

    Frank Wilhoit

    Cockatoo walks into an antique shop. Owner startled, but waits and watches. Bird browses for a while and finally picks out a Colonial sideboard, and asks the owner, “what can you tell me about this piece?”. Owner springs into action: Massachusetts, 1795, mahogany and poplar, original brasses, unbroken provenance from the original purchaser (Albert Sinnett of Inaddyquot, Maine). The bird listens with increasing impatience and finally breaks in, “yes, I can see all that; but how does it taste?”

  124. 124.

    kindness

    I used to live in an orchard adjacent to one of the Gallo (wine) family here in Modesto.  They had about 20 peacocks that weren’t caged.  They would roam the neighboring orchards and yards in this large gang.  This is out were people would let their dogs run free because it was country.  The big dogs would leave the peacocks alone, even though the peacocks rarely flew.  Apparently they can be quite aggressive and protect each other in the flock.

  125. 125.

    Roger Moore

    @kindness:

    It’s good to remember that peacocks do survive in the wild in their native habitat, one that features tigers and leopards.  It’s not too surprising their domesticated descendants can deal with dogs.

  126. 126.

    Brachiator

    @Frank Wilhoit:

    The bird listens with increasing impatience and finally breaks in, “yes, I can see all that; but how does it taste?”

    Love it.

    Reminds me of a favorite subtle joke.

    A termite walks into a tavern and asks “Where’s the bartender?”

  127. 127.

    Chris T.

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Being Aussie, these birds are probably venomous. Just saying.

    Not venomous, but they can kill you with their voice.

    (The Lyrebird has the same talent, though instead of killing you with sheer volume, it will imitate jackhammering and other construction noises.)

  128. 128.

    TerryC

    @Expletive Deleted: We have a family of 7-9 Turkey Vultures soar over every day several times in season. They ALWAYS manage to put me in one of their shadows if I am  outside on a sunny day – like today. I am convinced it is a game to them..

  130. 130.

    evodevo

    @Another Scott: ​
      Well, they do, but it’s like with reptile “pee” – they excrete urea as semi-solid uric acid (the white stuff in bird poop). Saves on water. Mammals (except for desert rodents) are water wasters who dilute the urea with water and excrete it as urine.

  131. 131.

    evodevo

    @JaySinWA: Yeah…lol…what a bunch of misinformed pussies…a couple of them went to the local ER after arresting some guy who had a bottle full of pills that were spilled…I mean, SRSLY?  And then the news article went on and on about how tiny a dose of  fentanyl is lethal etc etc. Well, yeah, if you inject it or swallow several pills, idiot…they’re all scared to death to touch it.​
    ​
    ​

  132. 132.

    MichiganderGail

    Watched a rumble between peacocks and wild turkeys one winter night at the Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, MI (Xmas lights display).  Both sides were amassing and doing their strut and puff routine.  At the very last minute, the head male peacock, chest to chest with a Tom, screamed, as they do, often and loudly, and turned and ran.

  133. 133.

    Viva BrisVegas

    We had a big macadamia tree at my last place that would attract crowds of sulphur crested cockatoos. You have never heard such a noise. The military should use it for antipersonnel purposes. They were the only animal I knew of that could crack the nuts. They could tear the eaves off houses.

  134. 134.

    Lethe

    @mvr: They had our schedule down! (I think they could smell the pancakes, too.) When you have to pack in a month’s worth of flour, breadmaking and pancakes are a once a week deal.

    The rest of the week we had our own Greek Chorus from them. We would fetch 5-gal buckets of water from the lake to do laundry, or chop wood, and they would be on overlook giving running commentary on stupid human rituals.

    Sometimes they would watch us use a tool, and hide it. Not take it, just move it. Amazing birds with with a very juvenile sense of humor.

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