Is it kosher to put a zoo animal on your life list?  I’m going to have to if I keep doing a post every other day like this.

I believe this was at the Wichita Zoo in Kansas.  They had an indoor aviary when I visited a like four or five years ago?  Lots of fancy characters in there, and the Luzon bleeding heart dove is not the fanciest.  But he was special, because he had gumption and temerity.  He had gotten into the “airlock” between the aviary proper and (maybe not so) sweet freedom.  One joker leaving the door open a moment too long, and he would have gotten out.

Fortunately this was a fairly spacious antechamber, so the bird man of wichita wasn’t a split second from the door at any given moment.  We all got in without incident.  It was just amusing because this is a pigeon-acting pigeon, strutting around on the ground like any you’d see anywhere in the world, but y’know.  Exotic.

Is Luzon the largest island of the Philippines?  I think so.  Fresh from that very catholic and conservative country to our own crappy bible belt, it’s a humble dove with a splash of red on the chest, like he received some biblical punishment or sacrament.  Mary wept a blood tear on his chest.

Speaking of bleeding hearts, at my condo there is a bleeding heart flower on the back porch that grows ridiculously well.  The soil there looked like a pile of cigarette ashes turning to clay when we got here.  Vile.  Everything hated it.  But this plant, every year dead back to a pile of broken yellow tubes, blows up to be much larger than a man, elegant pink flowers all over it, and looks pretty decent for a long time.  We tried to tame it this year with tomato cages, but who knows if we’ll succeed?  Life… finds a way.

–

I believe I’ve mentioned these guys a few times.  I started paying real attention to birds for the first time around 2006-2008 while living in Seattle.  I started paying real attention to bird calls after that, when being priced out of Seattle landed me in Federal Way, in the company of northern flicker screeches and one distinctive spring song that I came to recognize as the white-crowned sparrow.

Dweeet-dweet-wipwipwipwipwip.  That’s the impression it makes, but there are subtleties and variations, and the call frequently doesn’t make it to the last -wip because they will shut up if they feel nervous or distracted.  Incidentally, lots of animals will do this.  You don’t think of frogs as having an opinion about people, but if they see you looking for them, they will go silent.  A tittering bush full of bushtits, likewise, will shut the hell up if you come close.  It’s uncanny when you can’t even see the animal.  You got closer specifically to find them after hearing their sound, and then the sound stops.

Not as much of a problem with white-crowned sparrows because they’re fairly bold, living in open fields but also the kind of small trees you find in and around parking lots and sidewalks everywhere.  And in mating colors, they’re fairly distinctive – at least by PNW standards.  Strong black and white head stripes, bright yellow beak.  Larger than chickadees, smaller than robins, and they are easy to spot feeding on the ground.  Hello there.

I read once they’re considered crop pests in California.  Don’t care.  Let the birdies feast!  I kid, I kid.  Or do I?  I do.  Unless..?

–

I’ve seen a turkey vulture once with clarity, tho my memory of it feels so weak and incoherent.  It was eating roadkill and we zoomed past it and out of sight in a split second, on a road trip I don’t recall with people I don’t recall.  Was it with my bro and my tech support guy?  Was it with my husband and his mom?  Was it with jeremy and brandy?  My dad?  Pretty sure it was in Washington state somewhere between Tacoma and Vancouver WA.

Other than that, I’ve seen a lot of them in Kansas when visiting my brother.  Down there they circle just like in the cartoons, but I don’t know that they’re specifically circling dying creatures.  They seemed to be circling hills at the sides of the highway… the highway with lots of roadkill coyotes and deer.

At that distance however – from the highway on a sunny day – they are so many black Vs floating in the sky.  Were they actually turkey vultures or black vultures?  Turkey vultures are more common in the places I’ve been down there, so I’ll assume they were.

Turkey vultures are in that New World vulture genus Cathartes.  They’re very different from Old World vultures, but still part of the eagle and hawk clade, Accipitriformes, if I got that spelling right.  Once upon a time some clever characters names Sibley and Ahlquist came up with a gene testing method that didn’t need sequencing, which wasn’t as advanced then as it is now.  They put chromosomes from different species together and observed how closely they married up – again, if I got that right.  Using this method, they arrived at the idea Cathartes grouped with storks.  The idea had a little staying power, tho it turned out to be wrong.

I think turkey vultures look kinda ill compared to Old World vultures.  Their head seems too small, too weak.  And with the red-pink flesh, they kinda look like they’re partially skinned.  Cenobite-ass freaks.  Black vultures are extremely similar but the mercy of having black skin on their bald heads makes them look much less nasty.

Not that I wouldn’t pet one, given the opportunity.  I like creachers.

Apologies to people who would prefer I fact-checked or researched these things.  I think it’s more fun to freeball it and have a smarty correct me in the comments.  Or just give me your vulture stories below!

–

Note:  I’m still interested in replies to the post before this; check it out if you have a moment.

Who’s that yellin’ in the background?  It’s a rowdy cock.  The domesticated junglefowl.  I’ve called customer service and reached somebody in the Philippines with roosters crowing in the background.  As a customer service monkey I’ve received calls from Philippines, Hawaii, and the US southeast, all with roosters in the background.  You’d think a species with so many members over such a broad range might have more drift in its vocalization, but that shit is quite consistent and unmistakable.  Good job, cocky boys.

Most of the times I have heard that call from a live animal were on the phone, but a few times have been in person.  The most recent I remember was on a visit to Lake Hylebos, when roosters were lurking in the bushes near the entrance.  Never heard or saw them at Hylebos after that.  The birds looked smaller in real life than in my imagination.  The video game Sekiro has ones the size of a dude.

I never really thought about it before recent years, but how amazing is it that in ancient BCE domestic chickens made it from Southeast Asia all the way to Europe?  Global trade when many were far from understanding a global earth.  It really provokes the imagination.  If chooks got to Etruria from as far away as Funan, what other kinds of people and creatures could be hanging out in places one doesn’t expect to see them?  Might have been a very colorful world.

The Rooster is one of my least favorite songs by Alice in Chains.  As I’ve mentioned before, there was a spot on the tape of Dirt where you could pause and flip to skip both Rooster and Junkhead.  I remember the notes.  Two rounds of uwus.  The Cockatrice is the name of my big gay fantasy RPG that doesn’t exist yet and may never come to fruition.  Haha.  Fruit.

A cockatrice (as my character Jen would say, a coskalips) is worth note.  A lot could be said about it.  By the time it was invented, chickens had become ridiculously important to the world.  Eggs, eggs, eggs, and to some extent, that meat.  That means male chickens were not needed in large numbers.  You just eat ’em and let the best have all the gallies.  But what does that mean, psychologically?  Maybe nothing.  In more rural times and places people are less perturbed about slaughter.  It’s easy for me to imagine a medieval person feeling weird about cockerels tho.  Maybe the ones you killed come back for revenge.  Maybe one could be born from union with serpents and poison your eggs.  There were a lot of evil horse stories too.  If this animal is necessary, perhaps the need itself is a thing to fear.

I’m not interested in talking about the horror stories and calamities – especially incipient calamities – related to factory farming.  Or the folksy stories about how your grandma sliced and diced them.  There’s plenty of room for that elsewhere on the internet.  These posts are for talking about birds as interesting critters.  Chooks are pretty interesting little beasts.

If you need to know where I stand on eating them, yeah, I do it.  One of these years I should get over that, but damn.  Some emeffs are too delicious.  Factory farming is indeed a nightmare on every level, again not talking about it, so I’d be better to not do this.  My compromise on meat for the moment is that I’ll only eat beef on special occasions, or if somebody puts it in front of me.  By weight beeves produce the most carbon.  Non-ruminants put out much less gas.  In the future I may revisit that, may stop eating meat, but that ain’t now.

You know who has some interesting articles about chickens?  Darren Naish, of tetrapod zoology fame.  That is all.

–

Great blue herons are nesting now, and recently I saw several nests in the little managed wetland at the foot of Peasley Canyon Road on West Valley Highway.  Several nests with little white dots floating above them, on skinny stems like dandelion seeds.  Chicks!  So many chicks.  Wish I could get a better view, but I’d have to take the bus to the mall and hike on foot along the shoulder of a busy street to stand there with my binoculars, in another busy shoulder that is sometimes clipped by aggressive drivers.

Great blue heron chicks are hilarious.  I couldn’t see them for shit here, but I’ve seen pictures, and it’s fun to know those little pixels in the treetop were attached to gawky freaky little monsters.  If you happen to drive by that spot in Auburn WA, and aren’t needing to focus too much on traffic, give ’em a peek.

–

You know what’s fucked up as all hell?  Swifts and swallows are not closely related.  They look the same, they fly the same.  Swifts don’t have the iridescence.  That’s it.  They’re drab, but they’re winners.  Perversely, they are more closely related to hummingbirds than the iridescent and flashy swallows are.  I don’t know much about them, but I can paint one little scene for you…

Long before we were married, my husband and I were trying to live in Seattle, on the brink of getting bodily ejected by the cost of rent.  He was in the habit of taking the bus down to see his mother in Federal Way every weekend, and I began to go with him.  Most weekends were just a lil shopping, a visit to a park, eat at a restaurant one time, that kind of stuff.  Some weekends were family parties, crowded affairs where children were showered with gifts.  I appreciated it for food somebody else cooked, my husband felt some other type of way.  I remember the grass being dead yellow, tiny children being in the living room while a movie about lingerie women getting decapitated by a crude 3d sabertooth tiger played.

On one occasion, spring or summer, there were cool birds outside, nesting under the eave of the garage.  This was only about seven or eight feet off the ground, so real easy to see the babies yelling for food, and parents flapping in to give them a little.  They fly so fast, so fancy, it was a treat to watch them.  I’d seen them on the way in, and after the party had been running for a while, I stepped back outside to take another look.

As I was trying to watch the swifts fly above, I witnessed an insect doing a real similar type of predation.  I caught sight of a random gnat just in time to see a dragonfly buzz by and make it disappear.  If swifts or swallows are biting each other’s styles, both of them are biting dragonfly style.

There was some discussion of evicting the birds to do roofing, and I was like nay.  Intolerable!  I looked up the species, found out vaux’s swift fledges in a very short amount of time, and let them know.  As far as I know, they let the creatures live and did the work afterwards.  As far as I know.

–

Swallows is the same.  More or less.  I mentioned how they partition niches based on where they feed, with barn swallows down low?  Violet-green swallows feed higher up, around seven to twelve meters.  They are white beneath, and green and violet on top.  More or less.  At that elevation and as fast as they fly, I’d have never been able to ID them, without a few exceptional sunny days.

My father is harried by demons and can’t stand living in the same place more than a few months.  As he’s gotten old, he’s had to slow down the rate of moves more than he would prefer.  But after the first time he got a housing voucher, he briefly lived in an old folks home overlooking the Green River.  There he went off the rails for birding, for the first time ever, getting too much equipment and drawing too many birds, which bothered the neighbors.  One time he filmed a seal swimming in the river – way upstream from the Sound.  I wasn’t there for most of it – certainly not for the inevitable problem era when he made everybody too mad and flamed out and lost the home.  But I did have one visit.

On that occasion, we sat on his balcony on a sunny day, about ten meters elevation.  Ever sit on a balcony above a body of water?  In the summer?  The fucking insects were huge.  Creepy things I can’t even describe, multiple inches.  They eventually scared me indoors.  But before they did, I saw many violet-green swallows from above, from pretty close by, and that means I could see the violet-green distinctly shining in the sun.

Some years later, at the same Uwajimaya that once made my home boy herfy, I came out into the bright summer sun and saw violet-green swallows swooping around a paved corporate courtyard that usually only has house sparrows, pigeons, and gulls.  Were they nesting in the rafters of Uwajimaya, or the buck nasty hobo bar Joe’s?  It was a little magical.  I have no idea how they were getting enough food without those fat river insects.

Last place I saw them was in (hopefully) the last apartments I ever lived in, up in Federal Way.  There were swallows flying around at the usual height, with white bellies.  I couldn’t make out the top color, but I used the birding app to recognize their squeaks.  Violet-green.

They’re pretty cool.  If you’re in their range, hope you get to see them someday.

–

Swallows is the same.  This one looks like barn swallows but with no orange on bottom – just white beneath, iridescent blue on top.  I haven’t seen them feeding as often as barn swallows or violet-greens, but when I have, it was even higher elevation than VGs, maybe twelve to twenty meters?

I have to imagine they got their name from nesting in trees, but I have seen them in nest boxes barely above human height, right out in the middle of a field.  It’s the only reason I can say I’ve positively ID’d them before.  I have also seen swallows on a bright day flying near treetops (in WA state) and thought, likely but not certain.

The place with the nest boxes was some kind of wildlife reserve next to a busy freeway in Kansas, because of course it was next to a busy freeway.  It was the kind of place people come to have sad outdoor sex, with patchy clouds and drips of rain, the fields wet and marshy – dotted with bushes and small trees.  My brother brought me there on the last day of a poorly planned visit, for last minute birding.

The visitor center had some taxidermy birds of prey.  The red tailed hawk was smaller than I would have imagined.  In the fields we saw a lot of red-winged blackbirds at various growth stages, and a few proud yellow meadowlarks.  The weirdest thing we saw was these orange slimy gelatinous-looking finger-like structures on the branches of a small pine.  Slime molds?  An actual fungus?  Fruiting bodies?  I know next to nothing of these subjects.

The last thing we did that day before I got on the plane was going to a fast food place called Freddy’s.  We don’t have those in WA state.  They have skinny fries and smashed burgers with charred edges.  That makes everything more crispy and rich.  Baller.  I’m not eating as much beef now because global warming, but if I get a chance to have that again, I will do it at least once.  Gag in the Bag recently added “smashed” burgers to their menu, but if they aren’t also charred, they are missing the entire point.

Oh yeah, birds.  Iridescent blue on top and white underneath.  Cute.  Fast.  Maybe you can see them too.

–

Swallows is the same.  I would have been very justified in only doing one life list entry for all of them, because they aren’t all that different from each other, to an inexpert eye.  Normally I wouldn’t be able to pick out differences like this, but I have had some fortunate encounters over the years which made those differences more plain – situationally.

Cliff swallows are much like barn swallows – white and orange on bottom, iridescent blue on top – but the orange white and blue are in funkier stripes and swatches on cliff swallows.  Their look reminds me of over-designed tennis shoes.  That’s why barn swallows are the ones in tattoos.

I guess the main difference would be nesting in cliffs?  And artificial structures that have similar qualities, like under bridges and eaves.  The only reason I’ve ever seen one well enough to positively ID it – to tell the difference between it and a barn swallow – is that there is a nesting site at the Billy Frank Jr Nisqually National Wildlife refuge, which for all I know has an invisible dei in front of its url and is about to be renamed The White Mayonnaise National Pile of Mosquitoes and Birds We’re Going to Kill Wetland Condos.

That nesting site is a covered walkway near the visitor center, which has nests used by multiple species of swallows, rubbing shoulders with each other.  They’re so close to passers by that you could reach out and grab them*.  Fantastic!  I don’t know what season they’re around, don’t remember what time of year I was there because seasons not very distinct in the PNW.  But if you can find that out and pay a visit, you will get swallows on your own life list.

–
*don’t, of course.