my Cheney Quail

everyone (except the most hard-hearted *cough* damien *cough*) seems to like my foray into animal photo-blogging (here and here) - with the curious mix of mary shelley meets australiana - so in honor of friday-miscellaneous-life-form-blogging here are a few pics...

firstly, here are some kookaburras that i took yesterday from my back door - sorry about the resolution, they weren't up close and personal. they are kinda shy, although they love to 'laugh' nearly every night - mostly in the late afternoon/evening. It's summer here, so the sun doesnt go down till around 8pm. I usually eat out on the deck overlooking the water, and they let themselves be heard most nights.



the rest of the pix are of the now-famous quail and its 'mum' - click for larger versions. the little tacker is really difficult to photograph - it moves like lightning, and it is nearly invisible in any part of the garden - not to mention that mum makes odd clucking noises that apparently convey alarm whenever i walk by. as you know, many studies have shown that children learn languages pretty quickly...

the only time i can get a chance to 'shoot' it (that's a Cheney joke - in fact, i've named it Cheney) is with mum's silky whiteness as a backdrop. hence the following photographs (i'm not really trying to cheaply appeal to your sense of cuteness by juxtaposing 'mother' and 'child')

Firstly, here is the original pic, just cos it's cute - on Cheney's first post-egg day, he kept climbing all over mum, but i havent seen it happen since.

The good news is that I put another 20 quail eggs under another hen a while back, so we might soon have lots more frankensteinian pics to drive the fetusfolk into a frenzy - i know they love adoption, but they hate messing with god's will - and who knows? maybe the adopted mothers are Buster-style lesbians... besides, cross-species witchcraft mumbojumbo drives the blastocyte-lovers batshitcrazy. Jane had a great post yesterday about naturally-discarded, fertilized human feti - apparently 80% of all human pregnancies.

Jane said:

" But say by some fluke God has a soft spot for unrepentant preacher's kids who are good to their dogs, and I wind up in heaven. Is 60 to 80 percent of the population going to be filled out with people who never made it past dome stage blastula? I mean -- conversation is liable to be a bit thin, don't you think? What can you really say beyond "congratulations on winning the big swim?""

that's some seriously funny blogging...

there was a great article in Reason about this called "Is Heaven Populated Chiefly by the Souls of Embryos?" a while back that i pointed to a couple of times. i love Reason, especially their blog, but it's one of the many sites i dont get to read :-(

Incidentally, my little Cheney quail isn't the only bird to climb onto mum's back - I have some gorgeous photos of baby black swans doing the same thing (altho it seems to make more sense if it happens in the water - I imagine that paddling can be kinda exhausting and it's much easier to hitch a ride on mum's back) - lemme know if you want me to post those.



(is that a chipmonk?)






anyway, the piece de resistance is this last pic, altho i'm not sure it looks as cute in a pic as it does in real life. apparently theres a little message in quail DNA that says 'when you are little, hide under your mum and snuggle into her feathers cos that's the safest place around, and besides, it's really cosy.' The problem is, quail mums have a low center of gravity so it's probably pretty easy to get under there and snuggle. As you can (hopefully) see from this pic, Cheney actually has to get on tiptoes to disappear itself into the delicious pillow that is mummy


i'm not sure whether to make the 'cheney has his head in the sand - but he even gets that all ass-about' gag or any of the other jokes that just write themselves...