PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

zoobilation 2009: barn owls, alligator wrassling, and two-headed freakiness 2009-06-04 - 11:47 a.m. Yeah, so the September date didn't work out so well for Zoobilation 2008, as in, as far as I know, DH and I are about the only people who attended. Therefore, they've gone back to the early June date. Despite the threat of rain, there was a decent if not huge attendance. I might as well skip ahead to the most exciting event of the night. A pair of wild Barn Owls came and hung out by the alligator exhibit, giving great looks, although not going so far as to allow me to grab their photos. The really bizarre postscript is that I just added the sighting to my birding data base, and it congratulated me on my new life bird, the Barn Owl. Now FFS, I've seen the Barn Owl all over the world. It should even be on my freakin' Madagascar list. But for some reason...no. How many other birds have I quietly failed to add to my data base? Who knows? I don't even want to try to figure it out. I'll just lift a glass of wine and toast my new life bird, after all these years and beers, the Barn Owl. Yeah, right. Was the alligator wrangler bitter? Only a little. "Yes, OK, so we have some Barn Owls visiting us. It's cool that the wildlife wants to hang out...." But, still, when you're risking life and limb to feed vicious jaw-snapping gators, it must seem a tad unfair when all heads spin in the direction of the owls. By the way, he mentioned that the 8 alligators in the exhibit are now 25 years old. In fact, it was the birthday (hatchday?) of one of the gators. How time goes by. The zookeeper probably wasn't much above age 25 himself, but I remember when the exhibit opened, and we were told proudly that it would hold eight, count 'em, eight American alligators. Hell, I remember being a kid in the 1960s and being told that the American alligator was about to go extinct.... Well, he also said that somebody took a census and that there are now 1.8 million alligators in Louisiana - don't quote me on this exact figure because I was an idiot and didn't write it down immediately, but I'm in the ballpark. Whoa. Think of that. One more bad hurricane and we'll be more gators than people. The best damn show at Zoobilation that nobody knows about, year after year after year, is the African White Pelican feeding. I said that last year, didn't I? Oddly enough, whilst we waited for the show to start, a good old boy came up and asked us how long we'd been members, and we said about 25 years, and he said him too (which I believe, because he's roughly my age, just in stouter shape), but, "They never had this here Pelican Feeding before, did they?" Actually, as far as we know, they've had it for about 25 years, but usually they have the White Tiger feeding or a Lion feeding or some other glamour species feeding at the same time, so nobody knows from the pelicans. Except of course for the wildlife...Ask a White Ibis, Great Egret, Snowy Egret, or Black-Crowned Night-Heron what the best event of Zoobilation is, and they are all in agreement with Peachfront. I love these Black-Crowned Night-Herons. They crack me up. They were getting pretty vocal tonight, and all you can figure is that they simply do not know their own size, because they don't hesitate to practically take a fish out of a pelican's bill. Not the greatest photo in the technical sense but I just had to publish it here because it really shows the difference in size between the African White Pelican and Black-Crowned Night-Heron, and, trust me, the Night-Heron got his share. The keeper gave us the obligatory riff on how he has to handfeed the pelicans and cormorants to reduce waste, because otherwise the egrets, herons et. al. would make away with the entire zoo, but he knew that we all had a sneaking sympathy for the small stuff. Sure, they're evil-doers, who know damn good and well that they are not legitimate zoo animals, but they're only a little evil, right? A humor moment came coutesy of the white-breasted cormorant. Is it his fault that he had to discipline a thieving night-heron and now he has a white feather on his bill and for the love of all the little green fishes in the sea he can't get it off? Is there no justice in the world? I mean, c'mon, he's on the side of good and right and yet somehow he ends up with this annoying freaking feather somehow attached to himself in a most undignified and some would even say ticklish-making fashion? We cracked up laughing as we watched his futile attempts to rid himself of the feather for, gosh, probably a solid 15 or 20 minutes. Looking back, I kept thinking, Damn, the Zoobilation was so short this year but it wasn't short, we just spent more time than we realized laughing our butts off at this ridiculous cormorant. As DH pointed out,if he hadn't been squabbling with another bird to begin with, he wouldn't be in this situation. We saw the baby Crowned Cranes from September, now all grown up but still with their family. We noted a couple of relative noobs to the zoo, including the Red River Hog. By coin-ky-dink, I was just thinking the other day, gosh, there's a lot of Red Rivers in the world. Well, this one is in Africa, and yeah I realize that Africa is a big place, so shoot me now, because I'm not a mammal person and I have no clue where in Africa you might see this. Cute though, ain't he? I'm told his name is Matthew. The Wild Dogs were in a highly playful mode, even picking up and waving a palm frond at each other between chase scenes. They were fun. No one minds an avian free-loader but for some reason this year there were an amazing number of rabbit freeloaders. There's always an interesting story in the reptile house, and this year we had two interesting stories. First the one about the smuggled species of day gecko [Flat-Tailed Day Gecko, Phelsuma serraticauda] only found in like 20 squares miles of Madagascar -- and I inspected the dudes in question and while there are plenty of day gecko species all over the place, I never saw any quite like THIS -- so I believe the story. And there was the story of the two headed gopher snake... I won't tell the name of the actor who donated this, because I don't know if it's public information. As far as big A-list celebs when you think of Louisiana, no, it wasn't Britney, and it wasn't Brangelina. In fact, it probably wasn't anyone you'd think of when thinking of Louisiana, so you're not gonna figure it out. I'll just say that it was a nice guy who works CONSTANTLY (yet isn't Kevin Bacon) who woke up one day and realized he had a job that required a lot of travel and he couldn't take care of a two-headed snake. We were told it isn't zoo policy to put "freaks" on exhibit, and, indeed, it was in the backroom for member guests only. But, hey, the "freak" is here, and he (she?) isn't harming anyone, so I say if they choose to exploit it, I don't see the harm. I will just leave it up to their good judgment. The curator in question stressed repeatedly that his goal was education, and that he could not justify the holding of captive animals if he wasn't educating the young, and I could see that he was very passionate about this...but I don't think that being entertaining (as opposed to being educational) is a terrible thing. The nuclear physicists of the world have done more harm than the card players, if you ask me, and while I didn't ask to be a card player rather than say a nuclear physicist, nor do I think I should be hidden in the back room away from the kiddies because I am (gasp!?!) for amusement purposes only. But now we're getting a little too heavy for a simple visit to the Reptile House... Well, they moved the bird aviary, because Dino-Mation is back or whatever they call Dino-Mation these days. I had quite a lot to say about it, and it's always a lot of fun, but I'm running out of steam later Saw a Mississippi Kite soaring today over the neighborhood as I took my walk. back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford