Friday, January 01, 2010

2010


H A P P Y


N E W Y E A R

HAPPY? Not by my little red tail feathers it isn't happy. I'm a parrot with a thousand yard stare. It happens every New Year's Eve. This year's indiscretion wasn't Christmas cookies it was too many deviled eggs. Besides I'm betting you didn't have a house full of adrenolized college students fresh from watching the ball drop in Times Square...


...bobbing for apples in YOUR living room at 3:30 in the morning?

What's a parrot to do???

A wise parrot counts his blessings, tucks his head under his wing...

...and is thankful, that yet again New York City made it through another year unscathed.
Donegal Browne





Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Silver's Tongue, Dry Mouths and Their Possible Evolutionary Advantage


Here is a much better look at Silver's tongue. I learned something new about it. I've only seen Silver's tongue when it comes out forward, rather like a little black finger touching things. But here you can see that when it bends down it develops the curved shape and mobility that is found in many mammal tongues.

Which makes me wonder why his tongue never comes out and licks his beak as we do with our lips to clean or moisten them. Obviously his beak doesn't need moistening. And his mouth is dry so it wouldn't moisten anyway. And come to think of it that would make it pretty ineffective as a clean up tool as well. Scraping it on hard rough objects does a reasonably good job of cleaning it without having the possibility of abrading his tongue on a sharp spot.

Which leads me to the question-- what is the evolutionary advantage, if any, of having a dry mouth as opposed to a wet one?

Let us presuppose that there is an evolutionary advantage. No need for moisture as there are slime glands which aid in swallowing and other uses such as talking and cleaning are taken care of in other ways.

What might be an advantage to a completely dry mouth? It doesn't get your feathers moist but it would pick up a lot of the dust created by his "dust feathers" that condition the other feathers which wouldn't be optimal.

Also warm moist areas are hot beds of bacterial growth. Moist mouths do grow bacteria rather nicely. No problem with bacterial tooth decay in this case. Beak decay?

What about odor? Parrots are a prey animal after all.

Ah!

African Greys don't really seem to have much of an odor at least to humans. Even parrot feces doesn't have an odor. It might develop a faint one over time which would explain why Silver doesn't defecate in his sleeping cage if he can at all help it.

Odor gives away one's location to predators and as Greys flock in the wild, a roost tree might well be a big give-away otherwise. Particularly if it were used more than a few nights in succession.

If you get within an inch or so of Silver's head and sniff, he tends to smell ever so faintly like waffles. My assumption was previously that what we think of as "waffle" fragrance is a grain smell he'd picked up from eating seeds. Though now that I think about it if he's eaten lasagna he doesn't smell like lasagna he still smells faintly like waffles. Is that actually him?

Hmm.

(See. Once you start being curious and asking questions it always brings up another question even if you answer the present one to your satisfaction. There is never ever a reason to be bored, for the game is always afoot.)

I just went and sniffed Silver's beak and then buried my nose in Silver's feathers. He found it quite odd. I had Sam do the same for a second opinion. He found that even odder but didn't decide to be affronted and pinch our noses. His feathers don't smell like waffles. I didn't think they smelled like anything. Sam thought they smelled like dust but she was cleaning out her very dusty closet a few seconds before so it would be nice to have a few more noses involved to get a larger opinion.

TANGENT ALERT--As I'd explained about the current hypothesis dealing with bacteria and mouths, she updated me on the issue of Kimoto Dragon saliva. It had been thought that the reason prey animals bitten even slightly by Kimoto Dragons and though they escaped yet died anyway had to do with the amount of evil bacteria in their mouths. Wrong. A year or so ago they discovered the venom glands in the KD's mouths and said, "Oh, Never mind what we said earlier...")

Yes, hmm. But back to what the evolutionary advantage of a dry mouth might be, if one of the advantages might be lack of odor, and does an African Grey parrot mouth actually lack odor or enough so not to give the bird away at a distance?

Okay, we pretty much can tell at this point that at least to humans Grey's bodies don't have a noticeable odor.

As to their beaks and odor another thought brought to mind by a habitual behavior. After eating dinner with the family, Quicksilver eats whatever we're eating barring chocolate, avocado and other things that can kill parrots, he always whets his beak clearing it of any food debris and then rips off a portion of newspaper, chews it with his beak, we've always had the idea he was cleaning the inside, and then spits it out. But when Silver eats nutri-berries--little balls of various seeds stuck together with tasty parrot nutrients he doesn't do the newspaper afterwards. Hence perhaps why his beak either smells like grain/waffles or nothing at all?

Okay but does Silver smell like anything in particular to an animal with a better sense of smell? Like the family cats for instance? We've actually questioned whether he smells like a bird to cats before because of the behavior of cats around him. Initially cats tend to be rather confused by him. Okay he flies which makes them a little excited which they almost immediately get over. And it isn't just his size as the pigeons are about the same size and weight and they continue to be exciting to the cats. Besides he speaks English which isn't right at all if attempting to put him into the eatable category.

But the strangest reaction is when cats are trusted enough not to jump on him and are allowed to come up while he's being held and sniff him. They don't find his smell exciting at all. In fact, most of the cats Silver has known, including Pyewackit who didn't have a model for behavior in the other family cats as they've been in NYC, begin to greet him as if he were another cat. For the non-cat people, cats who know each other greet each other by touching noses. (Personally I think cats speak to each other partially in an olfactory language but that's another line of enquiry...) Therefore when Silver is sitting on someone's knee while they lay on the bed and watch TV together, if a cat jumps onto the bed it will immediately come up and put its nose on Silver's beak. Note they don't do this to humans nor do they do it to any of the other birds in the house.
Who I might add smell, well, like birds.

So with this incredibly small sample we might stretch things a little and surmise that to humans African Greys don't smell like much at all and to house cats they don't seem to smell like the birds they understand as prey animals nor do they likely smell like the pork chop he might have had in conjunction with dinner as they don't lick him.

The conclusion? We haven't discounted the possibility that a dry mouth is an evolutionary advantage due to the lack of moisture and therefore odor.

Donegal Browne

Monday, December 28, 2009

Quicksilver Parrot's Tongue and The Christmas Bow


The presents have been opened and while the humans are tidying up, Quicksilver stealthily puts one foot on the table, just a little as he knows he's not allowed on the table, and leans slowly in toward an enticing stray Christmas bow. The camera clicks.


BUSTED!

Well, it is Christmas after all, and we want everyone to be of good cheer and definitely merry, so I tell him it's alright and he can look at the bow. Besides I've been attempting to get a photograph of his tongue and this just might be the item to do that with.

Given permission he continues his lean and gently drags the bow toward him with his beak. You can't really see it here but already his black tubular ever so slightly tapered chubby dry tongue is shooting forward touching a spot, retracting an eighth of an inch and then touching another spot every second or so. After all, one has to get loads of sensory information about the bow first before deciding it just might be quite the ya ya to rip it to shreds.

A parrot's foot being scaly, and in Silver's case basically built for climbing and/or holding things, it isn't exactly the most exquisitely sensitive of sensory inputs. Very sensitive to pressure and positioning but it misses out on the finer points Plus being that his oral orifice is surrounded by a horny curved beak for prying food off things, there is some input there but not nearly what we have in our lips. Just keep in mind a beak is groomed by scraping it on bark or rocks and barring that, a dremmel tool, so not exactly a precise sensory instrument either.

And that is where Silver's tongue comes into play. He doesn't use it for manipulating sound by placing it in different parts of his mouth in the way we use ours while talking. His double larynx expands and contracts forming "whistles" that can be English words, the sound of clicking ice cubes, running water, or the smoke alarm. In fact he can talk quite well and still crunch seed with only a little muffling if he is talking and eating at the same time, His tongue is very sensitive. It does some moving of food around in his mouth but his other use of it often reminds me of a finger exploring new items in the environment. Touch, touch, touch, touch, touch.

It is dry. In fact his whole mouth is dry as a parrot hasn't in mouth saliva but rather has a couple of slime glands in his throat that lubricate food on the way down. In fact if he manages to beg chewing gum or hard candy from a human he'd really prefer it was moistened up by their mouth first to start dissolving the sugar otherwise he can't taste it.




Look at his expression. This is an engrossed parrot. If you look carefully at Silver's beak on the right side you can see a bit of his charcoal tongue coming out the side to feel the bow.
Sam drops a pan lid in the kitchen and Silver almost takes off in a hasty retreat. I tell him it's alright.

Reassured, he goes back to bow investigation. See the gray undulation the rear of his slightly open beak? That's his tongue still poking away at the bow.
Interestingly Silver didn't decide to dismantle the bow. I was very surprised. After he'd exhausted the tactile aspects of the bow he laid it down very politely and went off for further festive adventure.
Of course perhaps the bow avoided parrot mutilation because he knew that an attempt at shredding might just be found wanting in the behavior department and he isn't a dope. Silver knows that breaking the rules when the enforcer is standing right there eyeballing him is just plan dumb. You wait until no one is looking and then you shred the bow.
Donegal Browne