Conversation. Especially literature and language, education, football and baseball, movies, history, then and now, birds, two-lane roads. "Banjo" is a fun word, and the instrument can make fine music. But this isn't really a blog about banjos, except in the metaphorical sense of interesting sounds riding across a valley from one porch to another. Click on any photo to enlarge. Students, remember to footnote. All text and photos: © 2009-2014 Banjo52
Jul 21, 2009
FINCHES AND THE MEANING OF LIFE
Okay, I’ve gone a couple of blogs without talk about birds, and you’ll yelp if I don’t keep you posted on finches. Sunday I bought two new net socks and another small feeder, the old kind that forces the bird to eat upside-down, which finches weirdly do.
Problem is, you see too much of their white rumps. What is the evolutionary advantage of a white rump, when the rest of you is electric yellow, a lit-up target for near-sighted cats?
Another factor about the upside down finch-prayer to gravity: they look a little dead, hanging there that-a-way.
Speaking of which, my window has felt the impact of two drunken pilot deaths in the last three weeks or so. I’m attributing that to teen or female drivers—because both little cadavers were olive, not yellow. (You thought you had me on misogyny charges, didn’t you?).
Here’s one more series of events. By far, the majority of my finches lately have been female (I thought). What’s up with that? Did the males go on bloody skirmishes against each other, concerning territory? What kind of irrational creature would do that to others of his species? Over a some air space? Over some dirt?
Then I half-remembered, and then confirmed in The Books, that juvenile finches look like the olive-ocher female, weenie or no weenie. So I’m apparently teaching a ton of finch teens to come back here, or never leave.
But shouldn't I then worry about inbreeding? And in a finch version of Deliverance, who would play the banjo?
Next thing you know they'll move into your basement, enroll in community college, leave feathers in the sink, and drink all your beer.
ReplyDelete(Hey Banjo, if the banjo fits, play it.)
What a picture you paint,
ReplyDeleteHikerBiker. Feathers in the sink? < Finch Soup?
No. You're right, they're too much like vagabond children.
I think you out-metaphored me on the banjo line. But it sounds like some kind of green light.