Bird Tableau

May 8, 2020 12:26 PM

Dad: “Remind me again what you will do with a degree in conservation biology?”
posted by Bloxworth Snout (11 comments total)

This is a fellow who is living his best life.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 12:57 PM on May 8, 2020 [6 favorites]

Story Time/Travel Tip:

At the Audobon Aquarium in New Orleans, they have a room devoted to parakeets. (I dunno, just go with it.) It's an 800-square-foot screened-in porch sort of place, with a couple potted trees and some bird houses and hundreds of parakeets flying around freely, and you can just go on in and hang out. They also have tokens you can buy to trade in for these swizzle sticks pre-loaded with birdseed on one end that you can offer up to feed them - the idea is that you hold them out and the parakeets will come perch on you and eat the seeds.

I learned quickly that you actually don't need the swizzle sticks - if you just stand still, the parakeets will just come perch on you regardless. At one point I had one on each shoulder, a third on my head, one burrowing its way inside my cardigan sweater and down my sleeve, and two more squabbling for space on the lens of the a camera that was slung around my neck.

I struck up a conversation with the zookeeper in there, and she said that she sometimes loved it most when it was quiet because she still had to hang out in there, and she would just "sit on the ground and pretend to be a rock" and the parakeets would just blanket her, and she'd basically be paid to sit there, covered in birds. She was seriously one of the happiest people I've ever seen.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:10 PM on May 8, 2020 [35 favorites]

Dad: "Remind me again what you will do with a degree in conservation biology?"

With a little luck, earn enough to replace that surely birdcrap-saturated hoodie.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:19 PM on May 8, 2020 [5 favorites]

This was perfect after a long day. Thanks, OP!
posted by Bella Donna at 1:22 PM on May 8, 2020

this is also a highly transferrable skill in programming. you mostly just sit there grinning and swaying in your grossest sweats until the higher-order-components trust you enough to come to you.
posted by zsh2v1 at 1:40 PM on May 8, 2020 [18 favorites]

Answer "make the world a little bit better."

Thanks :)
posted by filthy light thief at 2:23 PM on May 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

I suspect ...

...they cut the last bit where there was a large white gob of cannery poop on the kids nose.

posted by sammyo at 2:32 PM on May 8, 2020

"What will I do with my degree in conservation biology? I will make friends with the birds."
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 9:58 PM on May 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

I love birbs.
Sparrows especially...because they are adorable and they are everywhere. Also, there was this one Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, a Sunday one, where Calvin imagines himself as one. It’s one of the ones where everything’s drawn very realistically, so realistic sparrow in Calvins big puffy tennis shoes. So now, every time I see them hopping about, I see them in those little tennis shoes. All of them. All of the time.
Oh, and just in case you’ve never seen a group of birds go ”holy shit!”
posted by sexyrobot at 5:14 AM on May 9, 2020 [5 favorites]

When I was a young punk, the singer in our band was into pets (not so much as an animal lover but more as a hobby, hard to explain). So one day he decided birds and he started with parrots, and the like and I don't know how he got there, but one day he built this giant wall sized cage and put several different kinds of finches in there. It was amazing to watch, especially if one were to umm enjoy chemical reality alteration. They would have tiny gang wars in there. Then he moved on to yorkies, so odd.
posted by evilDoug at 7:43 AM on May 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

For serious, though - who is this guy?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:24 PM on May 11, 2020