The internet finally woke up and here are the baby birds. I think there are three of them... there were three tiny speckled blue eggs in there just yesterday. I didn't look very closely because the mother bird was, understandably, freaking out and I didn't want to hang around more than necessary to snap a picture, which explains the total lack of framing. :) They're pretty cute for being so ugly, right?
current location : Portland
Saturday, May 02, 2009
OK, here are the baby birds!
The internet finally woke up and here are the baby birds. I think there are three of them... there were three tiny speckled blue eggs in there just yesterday. I didn't look very closely because the mother bird was, understandably, freaking out and I didn't want to hang around more than necessary to snap a picture, which explains the total lack of framing. :) They're pretty cute for being so ugly, right?
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2 comments:
Dude, the eyes are REALLY freaky.
Nice nest building efforts by Mom bird, perfect circle. I've been gathering dry grass and putting it out on my driveway for my tree swallow girls to build with, but can't see their work inside the boxes. They are soooo focused and eager....
When I see a nest like this I am reminded of the anology with our human ancestors, who made EXACTLY the same kind of crude chopping stones, unchanged, for several million years. It never occured to them to make it better because they were like the bird that built this nest, they just did it by instinct. Now, we look at a stone tool like that and can immediately begin thinking of improvements. But for the people making them at the time it was as unthinkable to "improve" them as it is for this mother bird to conceive of putting a roof over the nest to keep rain off the babies. She builds exactly this round open nest, from exactly the same materials, for millions of years, without the brain power to ponder doing it differently. Humans have been like that.
In what ways are we still like that?
And that reminds me of a book about the South Pacific where the author was sitting at a table with a Frenchman and his Polynesian wife. As they talked, the wife was idley making a beautiful, delicate, elaborate floral mandala on the table. When she was finished, the author praised the artistry, but the husband then swept it away in boredom, explaining that the women on that island had been making the exact same floral display for 400 years, and there was no art to it, just rote reproduction with never a thought that there might be more than one way to make a floral display.
We are accustomed now to kaleidoscopic cultural changes, ever-changing musical flavor of the month, and a constant scramble among all artists to be new, different, radical. I can't remember who said it, but it's true: "There are only two kinds or artists, revolutionaries and plagiarists."
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