I saw the cutest thing Friday afternoon. On the sidewalk there were 3 tiny birds. I don't know what kind of birds they are, but as adults you could easily fit about 3 or 4 of them into the palm of your hand. They are brown, and like to flock together in the dozens in one tiny bush. But one thing you don't ever see, even in these birds that flock together, is them sharing one little morsel together. Like any other bird species, they will fight over the morsel. These birds did not. So I stopped to check them out. When it hit me. These 3 birds who were all the same size were not all adults. One was an adult, and the other 2 were its babies! The babies had not developed the deeper-brown stripes of the parent, and had some downy-bits around their necks, but otherwise they looked exactly like the parent. And they were doing my all-time favorite thing! They were demonstrating a fixed-action-pattern!* The baby would open it's mouth wide, and vibrate its wings. Not flap, but vibrate like a hummingbird or a bumblebee, so fast that the damn bird looked like a vibrating toy. They probably made a little noise that I couldn't hear too. And mama-bird would hop over and shove her beak down baby's throat with a tidbit of waffle cone. How cool is that? I stood there mesmerized for about 2 minutes, watching her hop back & forth between the 2 birds that were exactly her same size, but who couldn't fly & still expected to be fed. Despite picking at the damn morsel themselves when mama was busy with the other kidlet. Weird. But the vibrating birdies were sooo cute! I was transfixed until a woman in a walker almost mowed them over because the moronic things did not get out of the way until the last second!

*What's a Fixed-Action Pattern, you might ask? I'm glad you did! I took psychology in college, earning a BA in it, and my favorite psych. classes were the animal ones. Animal Psych. was my favorite class of all time, next to the Human Sexuality class, which every damn freshman took just to hear the woman talk about masturbating being cool. I would like to talk about the sex class more later, but you asked about FAPs, didn't ya? FAPs are the most obvious cases of instincts that animals are born with. As an example, have you ever noticed that seagulls have a red dot on their bills? When baby seagulls hatch, they instinctively know to peck at the red dot on a parent's bill, and that prompts the parent to feed them. It's instinct for the baby to peck, and instinct for the parent to feed upon being pecked. They did tests to find out if it was really the red dot that was important to get the baby to peck for food, and the less & less realistic to a real bird their fake birds got, the babies would still peck if there was a red dot on something with the generalized shape of a seagull head.

The only other FAP I can remember is with another kind of bird that nests on the ground. When an egg rolls out of its nest, whether it watches it happen or it comes back to the nest to find the egg outside of the nest, it will walk over & roll the egg back into the nest. Researchers tested the bird by planting fake eggs outside of its nest while it was gone, and when it returned it dutifully rolled those things into its nest & sat on them!

I could never figure out what I was supposed to do once I realized how much I enjoyed learning this kind of stuff about animals. I mean, was I just supposed to spend my life researching animals looking for weird habits they keep? While that would be fun, don't ask me how I could get anyone to pay me for it. My senior year I took an animal psychology lab where we had a big project that was about 90% of our grade. For 4 years I had been watching the squirrels on campus, and I vowed my first year that if I ever had a senior "thesis" course, I would do something about the squirrels. So here was my big chance, right? Well, I couldn't think of one damn thing to try and prove! Finally, I came up with something lame. When I announced that I was going to do squirrels, a couple of people suggested I go to this park off campus, but I really wanted to use the UW squirrels. So I decided to compare the 2 groups. How to do this? To what end? I studied up on my squirrels & learned squirrel behavior, and it was quite interesting, so I decided I would classify squirrel interactions at each park to compare the two groups. And because I loved feeding squirrels, to make it interesting, I would first study both groups on their own, and then go back and study them while I fed them. The results weren't what I would have expected, but overall it was a pretty lame experiment. I discovered that as you might imagine, the campus squirrels were much more "tame", but they were actually more aggressive with each other than the non-campus squirrels when it came to competing for the peanuts I fed them. So what? How is this going to change the world? How is this going to get me a job? *sigh* So I became a bookkeeper. Oh well.

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