* The author was fooled by the first distraction display she witnessed, despite having read about distraction displays many times, and darted witlessly after a dramatically gifted killdeer, crying, “Look, it has a broken wing!” and pursuing it with intent to rescue and cherish. Only when the killdeer suddenly regained its powers and flew did the author realize what had happened and retrace her path to the spot where the killdeer had first seemed injured, there to find an insanely adorable killdeer chick squatting obediently on the gravel shoulder of the road. The author vowed not to be duped again.
* See my forthcoming book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Guppies.
* Imo died at the age of 20 (normal for her species), leaving nine children.
* I long for such a necklace, but Miles and Zoo Atlanta are not running a sweatshop, and very few exist. Yes, I realize they are covered with orangutan spit—that’s the point.
† Complaints have been filed.
* I have met my quota and hope never to use the word “hegemony” again.
† This is really the last time.
* This was hard on the pelicans, but they had it better than the moray eels, with whom the dolphins persistently attempted to mate, to the displeasure of the eels and the embarrassment of the staff.
* The first paper describes an observation of crow behavior made in the author’s rearview mirror, since he was too busy to go back and observe further. In the 1970s car manufacturers did not provide warnings that “Actions in the mirror may be dumber than they appear.”
* Sadly, I do not know whether any Japanese ornithological journal has published an article entitled “Maybe American Crows Don’t Use Automobiles as Nutcrackers, but Japanese Crows Do.”
* Primatologist Christophe Boesch writes that the nonsubsistence criterion “excludes food-oriented behaviors (difficult for a French person to understand!)” I can’t understand it either—pass me a doughnut while we think this over.
* Did we already see this movie?
* Sometimes the idea of reaching consensus by means of fixed staring is attractive.
* Smart would have been bringing a nutcracker.
* Crazed bird-watchers do not count sightings of captive-reared condors as real sightings. AC-8, having been born in the wild, counted.
* Yes, yes, I am willing to believe that your own family may have been pretty dysfunctional. Perhaps you do not feel that they engaged in normal patterns of social interaction, but I’ll bet they were the same species as you.
* Women hate that.
* Introduced by some cretin.
* Most of the teachers I have had did not have any idea what was going on in my mind, and that’s how I preferred it.
* Yes, I’m sorry, this is a grim tale of baby animals eating baby animals. We do it ourselves when we feed, say, egg salad to toddlers, but that is of course different, for reasons I am unable to state with a straight face.
* In The Thinking Ape, Richard Byrne asks why no one has reported seeing osprey doing this since 1954, and notes that Meinertzhagen was “the soldier in charge of covert operations in Palestine during the First World War” (although he discovered and collected the giant forest hog Hylochoerus meinertzhageni), and that “scientific fraud is not unknown!” Since Byrne wrote, it has become clear that Meinertzhagen was also covert about natural history. He had a fine, comprehensive collection of 25,000 bird specimens, and it seems that he got such a complete set in part by stealing specimens from museums and relabeling them as birds he’d collected himself. As related in Scott Weidensaul’s The Ghost with Trembling Wings, Meinertzhagen’s lies to conceal his thefts inhibited rediscovery of the mysterious forest owlet of India—scientists had been searching in the wrong place and habitat. Clearly we must be suspicious of information from Meinertzhagen. Still, he really did discover the giant forest hog for Linnaean science. And the osprey behavior he relates is rather like royal tern behavior. So please keep an eye on your local osprey nest. If you see them acting pedagogical, get witnesses. Try to deploy a video camera. And leave the giant forest hog out of it.
* When you herd sheep and cattle you want to hang on to every last one. When you herd geese you want every last one gone from the golf course or the airport landing field.
* Nervous people were more easily amused in those days.
* Which is why pollen makes people sneeze. Get a clue, immune system, it’s only pollen.
* I am the same way.
* Research with babies is good news for animals, because it is humane and noninvasive. People studying babies know they won’t be giving them electric shocks or doing gratuitous brain surgery or having them raised by prairie voles, and they devise subtle ways of figuring out what’s going on, which people working with animals may adopt later.
* Many of us grow up able to see the whole sky, yet neglect to learn to orient by the stars.
* Wealth indeed.
* When the teenager later attended college he transformed this event into a philosophical fable warning that at all times we should consider ourselves surrounded by a horizon of snouts, of which it is essential that we be aware, and at which we must shout. His philosophy acquired a small following. The intellectual progress of the pig is unknown.
* Don’t underestimate physical grooming, though. I want no ticks on me.
* He looked cool.
* Never referred to as a “salon.”
Becoming a Tiger: The Education of an Animal Child Page 56