| 9/19/09 12:08 pm - Gone to the birds
So I have two really fascinating birds in my backyard lately, and I've been spending a lot of time observing them whenever I can.
The first one is a bluejay we've named Pericles. He's youngish, possibly from this year's first clutch or last year's last clutch, and he's completely infatuated with manipulating his voice in as many ways as possible. We've heard him in the yard for a while, because from the beginning he loved to yell at the top of his lungs about everything. It wasn't long before he began imitating sounds around him, learning hawk calls, crow calls, and the like. And then he discovered us.
I was outside when he flew down to sit on the garage gutter. He looked at me, struck a pose, and belted out a hawk call...and then tilted his head as though saying, "so how was that? Convincing?" Striking another pose, he let loose a variation of it and then gave me a "how was that one?" headtilt. He followed this up with crow calls and something that might have been a mockingbird warble (a jay mocking a mockingbird, yes).
This was a few weeks ago. Since then, he's expanded his repertoire and performed for both my father and me. And generally hung around the yard making all kinds of wacky noises. Today, I caught him experimenting with acoustics. We have a metal awning over our patio (right outside of my window; rain is very loud) and he decided to use it as a tool for manipulating his voice. He was playing with echoes by calling from inside it in various places. It was wild.
I really love this bird. Hopefully I can get a video recording of him soon.
The second fascinating bird in our yard is... a parakeet.
We were hearing parakeet calls for about the last two, maybe three weeks, and figuring maybe Pericles was making them after listening in on someone's pet through a window. But the other day, we saw the actual bird. It's a yellow-and-green, so I'm provisionally naming it Chartreuse. It seems to be hanging out with the sparrows, which makes sense since it's a seed-eater, too, and they know where all the good seeds are this time of year. We're a little worried about how it's going to deal with a Cleveland winter, except that my father looked up information on that and apparently Chicago has feral parakeet colonies. O.O But we're going to be keeping an eye out for it. It let me get within a foot of it before it decided I was being too friendly, but I don't think it felt at all threatened by me, so hopefully we'll see more of it soon.
Aside from that, I live in the land of all-school-all-the-time. Seventeen credit-hours of courses, virtually all of them "Writing Across the Curriculum" courses which means papers out the wazoo. My media criticism course is particularly cool because we've been going to see live theater performances as a requirement for the course. I've seen Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Fiddler on the Roof so far, and they were awesome, first-rate performances. I need to keep doing that even after the live theater module is over, because it was brilliant stuff. But insert the usual "Ardath's head may explode this semester" disclaimer here because my teachers are as demanding as ever. XD |