Posted on 10/05/2020 12:52:39 PM PDT by SteveH
cool- love condors- neat birds
Some Blue Jays can even remember winning the World Series in 1993.
The Blue Jays had the chance to become only the third club ever to win three World Series in a row (besides the Yankees and the Athletics) but were deprived of a chance because of the 1994 baseball strike. They have never appeared in another World Series.
The conclusion of this study is going to cause quite a flap.
I bekieve it. I know that crows are a lot smarter than seagulls. I watch gangs of gulls go after clamshell lunch containers and tear into them to extract the scraps within. Crows unlatch them and push the lids up.
Ya got me, hook, line, sinker (to mix metaphors).
We probably need to hire some crows to design the tests.
I used to watch crows and seagulls on a neighboring roof. Large numbers of seagulls would fight over any food they had. Three crows would fight amongst themselves, but the seagulls left them alone.
You know, I adore that silly joke...it still has the potential to make me smile even though I have posted it a bunch of times...”)
As I have aged, I have become an avid birdwatcher. Not the birdwatching and identifying birds; I am not great at that-but I am fascinated by their behavior.
Most wild animals will flee at the sight of a human. But not birds. They observe us as much as we observe them. I think they are occasionally very curious about us.
I smoke a pipe...and I like to do it as I lay in my hammock under a pergola in my yard. When I first started doing it, the birds exhibited unusual behavior. These are the standard House Sparrows that many view as a nuisance.
They would actually fly at full speed, in groups of two or three straight at me and cross over me between me and the top of the pergola. They would occasionally land in it and peer at me though gaps in the grape vines that grow on the pergola.
I have been able to feed them from my hand, and I had a titmouse land in my hand once during a bitter, cold, New England winter day, and just hunker down for about ten seconds, not moving. Didn’t even eat the peanut in my hand. Just hunkered there and looked at me. It HAD to just be cold. It was breathtakingly wonderful, to hold a wild creature in my hand like that, who chose to be there of its own free will.
Yes...I do enjoy birds. Me and my Blue Jay friends...:)
Most of my life, I liked riding horses when I could, but never really viewed horses from the vantage point of their behavioral characteristics. To me, they were like a bicycle or a car.
After interacting more closely with them and watching their behavior as described below, I realized I had been missing out on the most compelling things about riding horses-the horses themselves!
Most of the riding I have done in my life has been the “follow the horse in front of you” variety, not all that exciting. But the horseback riding I did at horse ranch just off the Blue Ridge Parkway was a lot closer to real horse riding that I had ever done.
The guy who runs it with his wife is a real-life “horse whisperer”. I am not kidding. Their specialty it taking in troubled horses and horses with behavioral problems.
He rescues them.
When he gets them, the first thing he does is remove their horse shoes. When you go out to the giant quonset hut where the horses are prepared to go on rides, there is a pile of rusting horseshoes about four feet high. None of his horses have any shoes.
He doesn’t segregate his horses into groups, he just lets them all live together, stallions, mares, and geldings in a huge herd. He says it is how they live in nature, so he lets them. (He did have his prize stallion segregated in a small paddock one day as I reference below, but that was really the only time I saw it in several visits)
As he was explaining this to me, his prize stallion was in the field with all the horses, and was acting up, trying to engage a huge work horse stallion who completely ignored the high-strung stallion. It was comical, and Ron grinned as he pointed this out to me and said “Look at that big lug of a horse...the other one is trying to pick a fight with him, but he couldn’t care less!”
He talks to all of his horses in plain English, and I swear, they understand him. (All these names below are made up since I can’t remember them) I was watching them take out a bunch of horses one day for a group ride. He went to the pasture in which all the horses were standing around, opened the gate and yelled “Betsy! Come on.” and a horse peeled off, ran over about fifty yards and right through the partially opened gate, and continuing without any guidance, ran up the hill into the quonset hut and right up to a bucket of oats to eat and wait for a saddle.
He called “Jim! Come on.” and another horse ran over and up the hill into the “stable” to get set up for a ride.
He called out “Strawberry! Come on!” and two horses ran over and both went through the gate. He yelled after one of them “Daisy! Come back...you aren’t going out!” and without hesitation, the horse stopped, turned around and walked back through the still open gate unprompted!
I thought this was amazing-I know some horses are smart, but this guy seemed to have a way with them! When we went inside to saddle the horses, they were all standing where he had placed the buckets of oats and he just walked to each one and clipped their harness to an eye-bolt on the wall. As we were saddling the horses, I heard this ruckus coming from outside somewhere, a horse whinnying loudly and making various horse noises. I was puzzled by this, and didn’t know what was going on, but the guy wo ran the farm didn’t even seem to notice it. I said to him something like “It sounds like that horse is in trouble or something” and he stopped, went outside and I could see a small one horse paddock about 100 yards away with his prize stallion in it, and the horse was going mental, rearing up, just making a scene. He yelled at it “COWBOY! YOU AREN’T GOING OUT FOR A RIDE TODAY!” and the horse huffed and stamped its front hooves into the ground...hilariously, like a little kid being told he couldn’t play with a toy!
He turned to me with a smile and said gently “He sees us getting set, and he wants to go with me on the ride.”
I loved it. I had never seen horses in this light before, and I looked at them in a completely different way!
We were watching that last night. hehe
Some folks wanted us to stop eating tomatoes because they had a reaction when pricked with a needle that they claimed was pain...
Next up is why we shouldn’t eat cows...
Thanks OO. Exactly. I need more. Great advice.
They should enter that bird into the Olympics!..............
Great story!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.