This is our ongoing blog about a family of wild Shama Thrushes that lives in our yard in Maunawili,a suburb of Kailua, Hawaii. We are now in Year Two of Shama Dramas. We just started the blog so there are posts about the current chicks (beginning with the earliest posts) interspersed with memories of the interactions with the Season One Chicks, and their parents. Both Don and I are uploading so you will notice a difference in styles.
Saturday, November 7, 2020
Well hi there. I've encouraged Susie to actually blog here - it was her idea originally and I just put it together to "prime the pump", so we'll see if she does.
I have a number of other pix of the shamas and stuff, but I have slowed down shooting them since I already have scads of pix and vid of shamas, and this blog never did acquire a readership. If Susie starts blogging maybe I'll insert pix in her blogs after the fact.
But in summary, as of 11/07/20 we have four shamas still in the yard interacting with us; Bird, Birdlet, Peanut and Fluffy; Peanut being the dominant male chick from the "cutie" fledging and "Fluffy" being the sole chick from the 4th fledging of 2020, a female. They're both in adult plumage now, and to a large extent we tell them apart as much by behavior as by appearance.
They keep track of each other, and there's often an aerial display of dogfights as they jockey for position if we offer treats. A very definite pecking order as stated above, and various behaviors to out-position one another. All are hand-trained of course; this is necessary since the bulbuls in the yard have learned that we sometimes have mealworms, and if we leave food out the shamas won't get any. The Bulbuls don't have the nerve to come and sit on our hands, but I think it's a staple of shama behavior to hang around larger animals to see what sorts of bugs they disturb, so hanging around humans isn't actually weird behavior for them.
I'll add a couple of vid links here; the vids are largely out of focus and shot with my somewhat budget cel phone when walking around the yard; and of course un-edited since who has the time?
But it'll give you a small shot of relatively recent behavior, as of a couple weeks ago or so.
cheers...
DJ
these won't look like much unless you expand them to full screen size.... shot in 1080P though youtube may have toned them down a bit.
Chickie on one lag, happy, practicing her Life Song in Sue's office
DJ again. After a night of basically no sleep at all. Which seems to be bullish on me doing a shama post since I’m not functional to do much else.
As discussed in yesterday’s post, we’re now supplying high-grade live mealworms for the feeding of the remaining cuties. I thought a discussion of those dynamics might interest you - whoever you are, in the future, reading this. Presumably a shama fancier, a friend of the family, or someone seeking to quote me wildly out of context.
As I say, I’m providing live mealworms for the chicks…. but those are costly at $80-100 per lb and hard to keep fresh and alive; they tend to pupate quickly, having a programmed agenda which is other than bird food. Freeze-dried chinese mealworms are available from Amazon at under $25 for 5lbs, and once those are boiled to rehydrate that’s more like 10lbs, so a vast difference in price and storeablilty. And for birds above about a week old, perfectly fine food.
This means that I don’t want the adult birds eating up all the live mealworms. There will probably be one more litter of chicks this breeding season, and I’d like enough left over for them too, by dint of refrigeration.
This means, for one thing, not giving them to Bird. He will take them to the chicks IF he thinks they’re really super hungry and might not survive, and he did so when we initially introduced them. But once they were better fed, which he seems to think he has a good line on, he’d start just gulping them down himself. When I stop handing them to him and offer him a little cup of the chinese deadworms, he looks at me like I’ve failed him, and eyeballs the chinese worms skeptically with one eyeball after another for quite awhile, before finally eating a few and then flying off in a huff.
Birdlet, as ever, is the parent who selflessly feeds the chicks to satiation and only then eats stuff herself, so handing them to her is the smart way to go. I should note that while I will often offer them a small plastic cup full of chinese deadworms, which they are used to eating from in my hand, I do not do that with the live ones, since I think that would send a sign of abundance I don’t want to send. Rather, I hand them out one mealworm at a time to be plucked from my thumb and forefinger grasp by accurate beaks and sharp eyes.
Which leads me to some discussions of behavior, learning, and - dare I say it - interspecies communication on a low level. Because I wanted to convey to Birdlet that the soft live ones were for the chicks and the chinese worms were for the adults. These birds kinda know that the chicks can only have the soft live ones since they weren’t feeding them the others. However, holding the notion in their little pointed heads that there are two distinct grades of mealworms and that they should conserve the “best ones” for the chicks when they can’t SEE the supply is a bit of a concept. And Bird simply feeds the chicks until he thinks they aren’t starving, and then eats whatever he gets a shot at, while Birdlet feeds them to satiation and only then will swallow a live one.
So I started offering her the tray of deadworms first, to eat her fill. Which she will do. Then she stays sitting there on the top railing of our stair landing and says “foooooo…” in her little voice while looking at me, waiting patiently without taking more dead worms for herself. I’ll then hand her a live one and she’ll immediately stoop down to the ground to peck it and then carry it to the nesting box, and will do that without break until they are full, at which point she goes down to the stainless steel birdbath and had a drink and a shower.
In other words, she clear knows that (a) I have an unseen supply of live mealworms, and that upon her eating her fill of the dead ones, she can prompt me to give her one by saying “foooooo…..” quietly. This implies assumptions in her little head of the existence of something she can’t see (I keep them indoors) as well as an assumption about her ability to tell me to give them to her and my ability and likelihood to respond, while she ignores the dead worms in front of her.
And today she altered that behavior, as indeed she did on the second of the 2019 broods. It will proceed as before; she coming to the railing outside the door and calling a soft “foooo…” until I let her eat her fill of chinese deadworms, and then stopping her eating, fixing me with her gaze, and saying “fooooo….” again. (Often while her mate and various other bird species, and Tawny, are flying around and trying to chase her away, she steadfastly circles back.) But the alteration: After doing it the way she had been doing it, today after being handed the first live worm, she stood her ground with the worm in her beak and stared at me rather than flying off with it. And waited. Finally I handed her another one, and she immediately swooped to the ground to peck them. Thereafter, she has utterly consistently asked for two live ones per trip, even saying “foooooo….” if I don’t do it quickly enough. She never asks for three, and also now never asks for one. She wants two, and will sit with infinite patience staring at me, and saying “fooooo……” as necessary to get me to do my part. So she has altered my behavior along with hers.
In order to do this, she needs to be able to do more than just count to two. She needs to have a concept that I have a larger store of live mealworms than she can see, that I volitionally give her one at a time, and that she can alter my behavior by communicating with me. I wonder, but do not yet know, if she has precisely two surviving chicks in the nesting box, and this represents some level of egalitarian distribution on each trip, one for each child, like a human mom buying cookies to prevent fights. Why does she never ask for three? She could in principle carry five or more. But she knows how many she wants… she will wait a long time for the second worm, but takes off in a fraction of a second after getting it. When asking for two, they always go to the chicks, never to herself.
This is clearly an improvement on an optimal foraging strategy, and it relies on deductions she has made about my behavior, about my resources she can’t see but believes exist, and about my receptiveness to “foooo…..” commands and ability to intrepret them.
She has, in the past used the “foooo….” language as a series of yes/no questions to model my wife’s behavior, meaning apparently “do a different thing now”. Like, she’ll fly to the top of Sue’s compost bin, and say “foooo….”, meaning take the lid off this bin, using the “foooo…” to modify the designation of the bid as the object to be acted upon. If Sue does something which isn’t sufficiently like what Birdlet wants, she’ll fail to act on it and just keep saying “foooo….” until Sue does what she wanted and she then take sher own action, such as rooting for beetles in the bin. This simple language is surprisingly efficient at conveying somewhat complex concepts, since there aren’t all that many alternate actions to do in a given yard; and breaking the world down into binary “foooo….” and not “foooo….” choices can quickly shape a behavior. But y’know, it’s hard to figure how Birdlet would even do this without some sort of effective “theory of mind or agency” on the part of us apes. It’s unmistakable a sonic communication and it’s unmistakably directed at the humans. I have never heard her say “foooo….” to another bird, and I’ve heard her say MANY other things, including a lot of stuff she never says to me. That is, she doesn’t use bird words on apes, and doesn’t say “fooooo…” to any birds, even to her chicks, though she says stuff to her chicks she doesn’t say to anybody else, like “uh uh uh uh” if she has food and they won’t take it.
And she’s fully capable of doing a full-throated epic shama song many minutes long and intricate,
anyhow, like I say, a slow day. Tawny will be putting the finishing touches on his Life Song any time now, he was gone all day yesterday but back this morning to harass his mom and be chased by his dad, which was his pattern the other day too… gone for a day adventuring and then back for take-out chinese in our kitchen, where his dad won’t chase him. We see this pattern sometimes.
Reckon we’ll have Cuties in the coming weeks.
Rocket happily practicing his Life Song with F-bombs, on one foot
and who knows what the hell that is saying but I THINK none of them do the exact same one. In fact, a week or so before the chicks leave, they’ll practice their "life song" “sotto voce” in a bush or something, and I’ve recorded portions of some of them. Very quiet, not for other birds to hear but just to compose and memorize for when they belt it out full volume. They do this after a good meal when feeling fairly good about themselves, generally about 2-5’ off the ground in a bush, and it lasts a long time… as in, I’ve recorded partial songs on my cel phone which lasted 8 or so minutes, so the full song may be a half-hour or so long. And it may beggar belief, but I can tell that these songs are distinct; for instance, “Rocket” had a very different song than “Chickie” his sibling; Rocket’s contained profanity and hers didn’t… shama profanity being clicks and scolds, which totally fit his irascible personality. He worked those into his life song, while no other chick I’ve heard had done that. But that’s another whole discussion.
Hadn't written yet about our Shama drama when we were expecting Hurricane Douglas. We were worried that the hurricane would blow the birds away so Don set out the bird cage (the one we bought when we tried to save Eeepie 3's life). With Papa Bird sitting on the balcony watching, Don set the cage out and lured the chicks (each separately) in the cage with mealworms. Then put his hand over the opening to the cage, shut the door quickly and tossed a towel over the cage. Bird (the dad) looked on approvingly as if to say "What a relief! I've been trying to get this kids to leave for over a week now! Good riddance! " We still can't believe how sanguine he was about the entire episode.
The chicks were taken into the lower back living room which had been all boarded up so very dark inside. They were let loose. Our concerns that they might bash themselves into the windows or be really scared were unfounded. They stayed over night and next morning the wood (only over the door, not the windows so they only had one area of light to fly to so they would not bash themselves against the window) was taken down, the sliding glass doors opened and they woke up and happily flew out.
We really though that they would hold that against us but within an hour they were back on the upstairs balcony demanding their breakfast!
Well, the Cuties are now flying to me when I whistle, all three of them, and for the next month the yard will be full of shama activity with all five of them after us when we're outside. We'll try not to overfeed them, so they have to learn proper foraging on wild insects and stuff.
I've also noted that nobody is reading this blog, and Susie hasn't been posting anything, so I'm going to largely stop posting any text or pix. This is probably the fate of most blogs at a time when everyone has one. But life is short, and no sort of immortality is more imaginary than that conferred by a blog nobody reads.
I'll leave it up in case Susie decides to ever write anything else, and because it's no effort to leave it up.
So if at some future date. you happen upon this brief fossilized peek into a past time and place, you're welcome to it. Like the birds, I'll live it for the moment and not worry about capturing the events for posterity.
Just for the visuals, I'll throw in some office pix of Cheepy hanging out in our offices, where he'd spend quite a bit of time being a house-shama up until a couple months ago when the 2020 chicks started happening. He was mostly not getting food when he did this, though we'd eventually give him some. But he seemed to like the fact that other birds didn't bother him inside; and he clearly preferred the rooms where we were working. He wouldn't make any noise, and sometimes we'd nearly set something on top of him, just hanging out. He'd watch Sue do her internet and bookkeeping, and test various places in her office, or mine, to sit and think about things. As a house shama he didn't get into fights with other birds, and always eventually got a meal, so he treated it as legitimate territory.
Anyhow, I just went down to the lower yard, rather than just making the boiled mealworms available to the parent birds when they do a home invasion. Doing this I'm more likely to be able to check on the chicks. And indeed yesterday doing that, I had the first of the chicks standing on my hand... actually on the same hand as his dad and a cup of boiled chinese mealworms. He/she even took a few out of the cup after dad flew off to feed the other one.
Cheepy just hanging out with Sue in her office
And about "the other one".... turns out that despite my speculations and observations, there are definitely THREE cutie chicks in this batch, I know because I just went to the upper gate and they were all hopping around together while their parents fed them alternately. Since their parents aren't telling them to beware of me, they have no particular fear; hope that doesn't get them into trouble with other humans later in life. For a long time Bird would teach them that I was OK, but yell at Susie as a monster.... which didn't amuse her at all. More recently he has decided she's with me, and is to be trusted within reason around the chicks.
Cheepy watching the world from Sue's laser printer
I had noted to Sue several days ago that there might be three since Birdlet was loading up with food and flying across the street, while I could see dad feeding two of them nearby. In the past when I've thought that maybe she had just gone nuts, or was taking food somewhere scenic to eat it slowly, it always turns out that there's a wayward chick. Most times they eventually follow her back here; the only one which didn't was Peepy1, who was blown far downwind by a ferocious windstorm and who was fed by his mom flying a long way each time. Ultimately he didn't make it, which was clear from Birdlet's behavior, and they focused on Peepy2 and Peepy3, about which stories will probably be told in the future. Second hatching of 2019.
I can't yet tell this batch
Cheepy in my office next to me, on my ergo keyboard
apart; partly because they haven't neatly lined up three in a row for me, and they're pretty kinetic. Within only days they'll learn that they can get food faster by landing on my hand, and without interference from other species of birds, and I'll become their favorite tree. (The hand-feeding really is a shama advantage now that two species of bulbul has figured out we have mealworms. They can bully the shamas, particularly the young ones, but haven't got the nerve to land on my hand.)
We've gotten a couple of nice comments from NextDoor members who have checked out the blog, so thanks for that. And feel free to comment at the bottom of the blog page if you have questions or comments, might encourage us to post more.
here's one of the chicklets from last July, the Cuties look like this now
The progress with the two "cutie" chicks who have recently left the nest is going apace; they are both healthy. One of them is hanging around in the upper yard near the house much of the time, with the other one down in the yard. The one frequenting the upper yard is pretty used to me, since it has seen its parents landing on me repeatedly, and I can whistle it pretty close, sometimes to the railing next to me. However, this batch isn't yet old enough to know to pick up things, so they aren't directly asking me for snacks yet. Rather, I can be right there with their dad grabbing food from me, doing a half-turn, and shoving it in their faces, but they don't see me as a favorite uncle yet. Next week.
I have some pix of them but I'm too lazy, now at the end of the day, to pull the card from the DSLR and upload and crop and set levels and pixel size and all that. I'll get to it someday.
But for now I'll do a link to a past item of interest... this was Cheepy, originally Cheepy1, from the 3rd fledging of 2019; Cheepy is the chick who hung around longest and made it to full maturity while still spending a fair bit of time in our house hanging out.
This video snippet is shot on my cel phone camera, and picks up the last part of a standoff between Cheepy and his Dad, who normally terrorizes chicks until they leave. Cheepy had taken my advice and decided to claim the front yard as part of his new territory, which is a fairly terrible territory except for the fact that it comes with me; but I think what i was seeing was boundaries being set, in this case in the middle of the driveway. Instead of fighting, Bird did a long recitation of the history of his people, or whatever he says when he gets long-winded, and then with a final "SO THERE!" lunge he leaves Cheepy without being further attacked, and after that day stopped trying to kill him, though he would still chase him beyond the territory boundary, which Cheepy frequently transgressed since the door to our upstairs house was in Bird's territory.
Anyhow, here's the brief encounter... Bird on the left speaking at length, Cheepy on the right, both in formal postures... I missed the first two minutes or so of Bird's epic song, though the birds were in that position for that whole time.
This took place before Cheepy was in adult plumage, probably around late summer 2019. And yes, Cheepy would respond to his given name; or rather, he knew when I yelled "cheepy!" it meant "come on over".
DJ here. This is a short post since I've just shared this blog link with some NextDoor neighbors who have also been effusing about shamas. I hope you like what we've done so far... though we've barely scratched the surface in terms of the stories we could already tell, the photos and video, etc. Before this there have been like 5 people total who have seen this.
We have learned quite a bit about shama behavior generally, perhaps including some stuff others haven't noted; and certainly have found that there are a lot of very distinctive personalities among the birds.
a young "Hawky" of the Fluffbutts experimenting with baths
Susie says that she'll respond to any comments, and I will from time to time as well.
Nothing much new to report on the birds.... well, except that we haven't seen Tawny since the the last post so he may be off on a perilous stage of his life; he was/is the last of the "fluffbutts" to be around, the first fledging of 2020. The second fledging didn't produce viable chicks, and now the two "Cuties" are flying around and being fed by their parents, and within a week or so will be introduced to us by their parents. Within 6 weeks of that, their parents will disown them and we'll be their only friends, since they can't stand each other.
Oh, and I can confirm a total of two Cuties, which will initially go by the designations Cutie1 and Cutie2 until they develop personalities and hang around, which some do and some don't. Inasmuch as the parent birds continued going into the nesting box for some days, I think think there were either unhatched eggs or maybe a chick that failed to thrive So if the cats don't get them in their initial clumsy phase, they'll be up here soon.
The fact that their parents go all psycho on them at about age 6 weeks underscores the fact that while the main initial dynamic, and core motivation, of the human-bird friendship is based on food, that's not all there is to it. Because the young birds get not only food but security from their parent birds... only to have that abruptly discontinued about 6-8 weeks after they leave the nest, with the parents not only not feeding them but driving them away. So we go from being the weird aunt & uncle to the only dependable friends from their chickhood, and we see some of them for quite awhile, particularly if they decide to spend time indoors rather than going out to pick fights with mature shamas immediately. (Which seldom ends well). So there's a security aspect to it too.
Hope you find it interesting. There is generally a time lag in terms of getting photos up, and a far longer time lag to get videos up, since we actually do have other stuff to do, and the process is a bit cumbersome. So the pix are often flashbacks... click them to see full resolution. (Well not FULL resolution, but the cropped-down size I uploaded).
DJ here. I figured I should do a quick post and note that as of yesterday, the "Cuties" have left the nest box and are fluttering around the yard. There appears to be two of them. I can't rule out three, but I'm saying two based on my spotting so far, and their parents' behavior.
Birdlet feeding the Fluffbutts earlier this year. Now there are two Cuties following in their footsteps
They look about like baby shamas always do. Initially their parents seemed to be having trouble getting them to take food after leaving the nest, but they are eating healthily now, no small thanks to our pricey live mealworms. They're currently down in the deep backyard hiding in the brush. Once they get a bit older they will accompany their parents up to the house and meet us.
I've shot a little video, but it's a pain to get the video off the camera, upload it to youtube, and then link it here. Eventually maybe. For now, just imagine a generic pair of baby shamas, Cutie1 and Cutie2, currently of indeterminate gender as far as we know.
Both parents are feeding them; as usual Bird is more likely to eat the high-grade mealworms than give them to his chicks but he does give some. If I feed him a fair bit on the tougher reconstituted ones he's then more likely to take the soft ones off to the chicks. But in terms of getting calories into the chicks, Birdlet is the pony to bet on.
This will be the third brood of 2020; the second one didn't produce any surviving chicks, perhaps because we weren't supplementing with live mealworms and there just wasn't enough food to raise them up. Their parents seem to think that once they're out of the nest, they're old enough to eat the tough ones, and they probably know.
I've seen one new behavior... new to me anyhow... in the last few days. That's the strategy of the red-whiskered bulbuls... they are half the size of the shamas and quicker. They try to steal the food the shamas are carrying to their chicks, made easier by the fact that they have figured out that we feed them. One of the RWB's will station about 10-15 feet higher than where we're feeding, wait until the shama has a mouthful, and then leap off a split-second after the shama leaves, trading the altitude for speed and wham-ing the shama from behind or making a quick pass, to get it to drop the food. This is dependable behavior which happens every time. Bird is the one mostly targeted since he takes a pretty direct line in the open; Birdlet flies a circuitous course around objects which they can't anticipate and swoop down on effectively.
A very nervous Tawny showed up for several snacks yesterday but we may or may not see much more of him with the parent birds on high alert protecting the new chicks. Haven't seen him today.
Chickie practicing her Life Song in Sue's office, happily on one foot
DJ again. After a night of basically no sleep at all. Which seems to be bullish on me doing a shama post since I’m not functional to do much else.
As discussed in yesterday’s post, we’re now supplying high-grade live mealworms for the feeding of the remaining cuties. I thought a discussion of those dynamics might interest you - whoever you are, in the future, reading this. Presumably a shama fancier, a friend of the family, or someone seeking to quote me wildly out of context on some entirely different issue.
As I say, I’m providing live mealworms for the chicks…. but those are costly at $80-100 per lb and hard to keep fresh and alive; they tend to pupate quickly, having a programmed agenda which is other than bird food. Freeze-dried chinese mealworms are available from Amazon at under $25 for 5lbs, and once those are boiled to rehydrate that’s more like 10lbs, so a vast difference in price and storeabililty with implications about human energy and resource use. And for birds above about a week old, perfectly fine food.
This means that I don’t want the adult birds eating up all the live mealworms. There will probably be one more litter of chicks this breeding season, and I’d like enough left over for them too, by dint of refrigeration.
This means, for one thing, not giving them to Bird. He will take them to the chicks IF he thinks they’re really super hungry and might not survive, and he did so when we initially introduced them. But once they were better fed, which he seems to think he has a good line on, he’d start just gulping them down himself. When I stop handing them to him and offer him a little cup of the chinese deadworms, he looks at me like I’ve failed him, and eyeballs the chinese worms skeptically with one eyeball after another for quite awhile wondering Just How Things Went Wrong, before finally eating a few and then flying off in a huff.
Birdlet, as ever, is the parent who selflessly feeds the chicks to satiation and only then eats stuff herself, so handing them to her is the smart way to go. I should note that while I will often offer them a small plastic cup full of chinese deadworms, which they are used to eating from in my hand, I do not do that with the live ones, since I think that would send a sign of abundance I don’t want to send. Rather, I hand them out one mealworm at a time to be plucked from my thumb and forefinger grasp by accurate beaks and sharp eyes.
Which leads me to some discussions of behavior, learning, and - dare I say it - interspecies communication on a reasonable level. Because I wanted to convey to Birdlet that the soft live ones were for the chicks and the chinese worms were for the adults. These birds kinda know that the chicks can only have the soft live ones since they weren’t feeding them the others. However, holding the notion in their little pointed heads that there are two distinct grades of mealworms and that they should conserve the “best ones” for the chicks when they can’t SEE that supply is a bit of a concept. And Bird simply feeds the chicks until he thinks they aren’t starving, and then eats whatever he gets a shot at, while Birdlet feeds them to satiation and only then will swallow a live one.
So I started offering her the tray of deadworms first, to eat her fill. Which she will do. Then she stays sitting there on the top railing of our stair landing and says “foooooo…” in her little voice while looking at me, waiting patiently without taking more dead worms for herself. I’ll then hand her a live one and she’ll immediately stoop down to the ground to peck it and then carry it to the nesting box, and will do that without break until the chicks are full, at which point she goes down to the stainless steel birdbath and has a drink and a shower as mothers will do.
In other words, she clearly knows that (a) I have an unseen supply of live mealworms, and that upon her eating her fill of the dead ones, she can prompt me to give her one by saying “foooooo…..” quietly. This implies assumptions in her little head about the existence of something she can’t see (I keep them indoors) as well as an assumption about her ability to tell me to give them to her and my ability and likelihood to respond, while she ignores the dead worms in front of her.
And today she altered that behavior, as indeed she did on the second of the 2019 broods. It will proceed as before; she coming to the railing outside the door and calling a soft “foooo…” until I let her eat her fill of chinese deadworms, and then stopping her eating, fixing me with her gaze, and saying “fooooo….” again. (Often while her mate and various other bird species, and Tawny, are flying around and trying to chase her away, she steadfastly circles back.) But the alteration: After doing it the way she had been doing it, today after being handed the first live worm, she stood her ground with the worm in her beak and stared at me rather than flying off with it. And waited. Finally I handed her another one, and she immediately swooped to the ground to peck them. Thereafter, she has utterly consistently asked for two live ones per trip, even saying “foooooo….” if I don’t do it quickly enough. She never asks for three, and also now never asks for one. She wants two, and will sit with infinite patience staring at me, and saying “fooooo……” as necessary to get me to do my part. So she has altered my behavior along with hers.
In order to do this, she needs to be able to do more than just count to two. She needs to have a concept that I have a larger store of live mealworms than she can see, that I volitionally give her one at a time, and that she can alter my behavior by communicating with me. I wonder, but do not yet know, if she has precisely two surviving chicks in the nesting box, and this represents some level of egalitarian distribution on each trip, one for each child, like a human mom buying cookies to prevent fights. Why does she never ask for three? She could in principle carry five or more. But she knows how many she wants… she will wait a long time for the second worm, but takes off in a fraction of a second after getting it. When asking for two, they always go to the chicks, never to herself.
And if I anticipate and give her two, she immediately flies off with them, so it's the number of worms and not the number of times I give them to her.
This is clearly an improvement on an optimal foraging strategy, and it relies on deductions she has made about my behavior, about my resources she can’t see but believes exist, and about my receptiveness to “foooo…..” commands and ability to intrepret them.
She has, in the past used the “foooo….” language as a series of yes/no questions to model my wife’s behavior, meaning apparently “do a different thing now”. Like, she’ll fly to the top of Sue’s compost bin, and say “foooo….”, meaning take the lid off this bin, using the “foooo…” to modify the designation of the bin as the object for change to act upon. If Sue does something which isn’t sufficiently like what Birdlet wants, she’ll fail to act on it and just keep forlornly saying “foooo….” until Sue does what she wanted and she then take her own action, such as rooting for beetles in the bin. This simple language is surprisingly efficient at ultimately conveying somewhat complex concepts, since there aren’t all that many alternate actions to do in a given yard; and breaking the world down into binary “foooo….” and "not foooo….” choices can quickly shape a behavior. But y’know, it’s hard to figure how Birdlet would even do this without some sort of effective “theory of mind or agency” on the part of us apes. It’s unmistakably a sonic communication and it’s unmistakably directed at the humans. I have never heard her say “foooo….” to another bird, and I’ve heard her say MANY other things, including a lot of stuff she never says to me. That is, she doesn’t use bird words on apes, and doesn’t say “fooooo…” to any birds, even to her chicks, though she says stuff to her chicks she doesn’t say to anybody else, like “uh uh uh uh” if she has food and they won’t take it.
And she’s fully capable of doing a full-throated epic shama song many minutes long and intricate, and who knows what the hell that is saying but I THINK none of them do the exact same one. In fact, a week or so before the chicks leave, they’ll practice their "life song" “sotto voce” in a bush or something, often standing on just one foot, and I’ve recorded portions of some of them. Very quiet, not for other birds to hear but just to compose and memorize for when they belt it out full volume later in life. They do this after a good meal when feeling fairly good about themselves, generally about 2-5’ off the ground in a bush (or occasionally an office), and it lasts a long time… as in, I’ve recorded partial songs on my cel phone which lasted 8 or so minutes, so the full song may be a half-hour or so long. And it may beggar belief, but I can tell that these songs are distinct; for instance, “Rocket” had a very different song than “Chickie” his sibling; Rocket’s contained profanity and hers didn’t… shama profanity being clicks and scolds, which totally fit his irascible personality. He worked those into his life song, while no other chick I’ve heard had done that. But that’s another whole discussion.
Rocket happily practicing his Life Song with F-bombs, on one foot
anyhow, like I say, a slow day. Tawny will be putting the finishing touches on his Life Song any time now, he was gone all day yesterday but back this morning to harass his mom and be chased by his dad, which was his pattern the other day too… gone for a day adventuring and then back for take-out chinese in our kitchen, where his dad won’t chase him. We see this pattern sometimes.
Reckon we’ll have Cuties in the coming weeks.
Bonus: here's a little video segment of Rocket practicing his Life Song the day before he left permanently. I didn't know when recording this that it was the last time I'd see him, since he'd hung around a fair while.
DJ here. In the last brief update, I noted that we might lose the current chicks as we did the last batch, because we didn't have many soft insects to feed them and their parents didn't seem to be finding many, perhaps due to the relatively low rainfall lately. The freeze-dried chinese mealworms that I boil to make them edible are apparently not edible by young chicks, although they love them a week or so after they fledge.
So I had put in an order on Sunday for some live mealworms from an east coast state, but figured the chicks might not survive until they arrived, supposedly Saturday at the earliest, just regular first-class parcel which was how the seller rolled. So I was glad to see, when checking with the USPS website, that they were out for delivery today - wednesday - which is pretty darn quick shipping since I ordered them on Sunday night.
Once the birds tumbled to the fact that I had a better class of worms, they set up a constant relay taking them to the chicks. There must still be at least two surviving because I don't think one could have eaten that much, unless it's enormous. So perhaps we'll see some "cuties" or perhaps we'll come up with a different name. Sue recommends cuties.
blog entries are better with pix. Here's Cheepy typing a memo
As I've obliquely mentioned before, I no longer make efforts to go down and win the chicks' familiarity a few days after fledging by exchanging whistles and gradually getting them used to me; the parent birds will bring them up and introduce them soon enough... so the little critters in the nesting box don't know it, but they're already fated to be our good friends until their parents chase them off.
This is another slow-brain day for me, so I'll describe just a bit more of how I used to get to know the chicks, back with the broods of 2019. Surprisingly, it was not food-based. Rather, my ears quickly learned the single-note location whistles of baby shamas and attuned to those, so just by walking in the yard I could tell roughly where they were if they were whistling. If they weren't, I'd wait. What I found was that if I echoed their whistles with a similar whistle a second after they spoke, they'd get into sort of a dueling-banjo's cadence with me with whistle and counter-whistle becoming nearly constant instead of the solo whistles a chick will normally put out every 30-60 seconds. This will work with multiple chicks at once.
The surprising thing is that doing this will cause the little fluffy non-aerodynamic spheroids to actually approach me. So after doing this for 15 minutes or so, the baby shamas would have often moved to within 4 or so feet of me, the better to whistle back and forth. I guess no predators ever bothered to figure out this flaw in their survival coding, but it causes me to reflect on the fact that as hunter-gatherers our ancestors had brains about 20% larger than ours, and they probably knew all sorts of stuff like that, if I can so quickly learn such behaviors by observation and experiment. In many ways that would have been a richer way to live I think. Anyhow, I don't do that now because the mosquitoes eat me alive while I'm doing it, and I never did learn to tolerate slathering toxins on my skin to deter them. So I don't go about winning their acceptance the hard way, which was necessary when Bird still warned them away from me with razzberry monster calls and postures. Now he just drops them off with me like I'm his daycare staff and goes off to do Bird stuff.
here's Chickie sharing a meal with us in the kitchen
I'll throw in a couple of unrelated photos because it breaks up the text nicely; we haven't discussed Cheepy and Chickie much yet; most of the chicks leave after 4-6 weeks, but some hang around longer and graduate from having a brood name like "chicklet3" to a given name like Chickie. Cheepy - originally cheepy1 - hung out longest and got into full adult male plumage, lasting here for 7 months or so and spending some time in the house every day. Chickie hung around for about 4 months and by the time she went off to conquer the world she was mostly in adult-female plumage. The Cheepies were the 3rd nesting of 2019 and the Chicklets the 4th, so Chickie was about 6 weeks younger than Cheepy. Both of them spent significant time as indoor birds by choice; Cheepy since he was sort of "slow" and needed help, and Chickie just because. You'll see more of them going forward, though I doubt we'll see more of them... they've both departed now.
this is one of the fluffbutts a day or so after leaving nest
DJ here. This is a slow day for me, may have gotten a bad grapefruit yesterday or something - do others get feeling surreal and a headache after eating a bad grapefruit? - rhetorical question, but it means bad sleep, and that in turn means low-productivity days. Fortunately, at age 69 nobody expects a US citizen to do much of anything useful anyhow, and that's without even counting in the fact that we're sequestered at home against a bat-plague. So here I am with a thousand-yard stare and no concentration for more than updating the bird blog.
There's currently a chick or chicks in the nesting box since yesterday morning. This is directly from the adult birds' behavior; they'll take soft insects to feed them to the yet-unseen chick or chicks, while swallowing tough chinese freezedried mealworms themselves. But the last nesting had no survivors, and that's in marked contrast to the first batch probably because we were providing a lot of live mealworms when the fluffbutts were hatching out, and ran out due to aforesaid plague-sequestration. So the last batch, dubbed the 'Cuties" by Susie, had no survivors. Maybe not enough rain to provide soft bugs. No idea whether these will fare likewise, but it hasn't been raining much.
Sue offering Birdlet some chinese worm soup, last batch of chicks
The adult birds have an instinct to confuse predators and competitors by flying in the wrong direction once they have chick food; typically they'll fly to the lower yard and act nonchalant while doing the shama equivalent of counting to ten slowly, and then will fly to the nesting box. They then repeat that on the way back. Not sure who they're fooling, probably other birds. Although the instinct seems to be stronger when carrying food to them than when returning for more food, because after awhile if I keep offering more they'll ultimately just say the heck with it on the way back. The male abandons the ruse first, and after not that many feedings; he knows that I know where the chicks are. Birdlet is a bit more circumspect and will do a huge circle without landing, flying to me by way of the lower yard, the great circle route like flying from London to Chicago by going over Greenland. But even she will ultimately just shuttle directly back and forth IF I have enough live mealworms, which as I've said, I don't at the moment.
Sue feeding birdlet, mid-flutter
We sacrificed some of Sue's mealworm beetles... you wouldn't think a beetle would count as soft food, but the parents seem to think so, and by the time they've pecked a beetle into goo it probably is digestible by a baby shama. If that was wrong, one would think that the instinct would have been lost. So they have taken a number of those up there, but a tiny amount compared to the volume a shama chick needs to grow from an egg to a flying bird. I have some mealworms on order, but the story on this batch of chicks will be determined before they get here, if they ever do get here. Our mailman doesn't appreciate it when mealworms get loose in his delivery van. We shall see.
No idea what to call them if they do survive, and it probably is bad luck to come up with a name beforehand... I suppose we could recycle "cuties" since that was never actually used for a batch of chicks, but it seems disrespectful to the last batch in a "lest we forget" way; if humans are paying attention it seems like attention should be paid at least in a blog. Feel free to comment suggesting names for future batches.
another Fluttering shot of Birdlet with Sue
Little Scruffy the bulbul has made himself a regular and his mother (?) has decided "the hell with it" and lands with him to take mealworms from me and stuff them into the kid's face, despite being generally skeptical of apes bearing gifts.
I had thought we'd seen the last of Tawny since he didn't show up all day yesterday, but he was in the kitchen again this morning clicking fretfully as his dad loomed outside the door and sang stories of his imminent ass-kicking. But Tawny tanked up pretty well before zooming out past his old man, so he's probably good for another 48 hours of adventures before making it back or succumbing to the fights he starts.
I wasn't going to add another mini-blog entry today but Susie says I should, after I related my experience just now in the back yard, small though it was.
This is earlier in the year, Bird feeding a Fluffbutt
This is a sleepy day for me; as a guy whose brain isn't well-suited to sleeping right I'm trying to bounce back yet again from another bout of far-too-little sleep days on end, which leaves me more hanging out than plotting and planning to save the world, and is probably what led me to make friends with the backyard dinosaurs in the first place.
here are some recent shots of Tawny
Not a lot of new chapters; Bird did take a soft live mealworm or two to the nesting box on the side of the house, and he really likes those. Having him do anything besides swallowing as many as you'll give him, immediately, means that there's at least one young chick needing soft food. He wouldn't give his mate one of the live ones. So there may be at least one hatchling. It hasn't rained a lot and the last hatching had no survivors, and we are fresh out of live mealworms which would help us pull them through... the reconstituted ones we have are good enough for chicks a week old but not fresh-hatched. So another casualty of the pandemic, though really it just means the reproduction rate is held down to what it would otherwise be, which is probably appropriate.
Anyhow, that's not what Sue asked me to write about.
Scruffy the baby bulbul has been showing up shaking his wings and cheeping to be fed outside the kitchen at the top of the stairway... apparently my grabbing him and getting him out of the house a couple days ago is water under the bridge. He's a homely little guy who will grow up homely, his only pretty feature a red butt, but the species has personality. As Samuel Jackson's character said in Pulp Fiction, personality goes a long way.
But that's not why Susie asked me to write today.
Tawny the fluffbutt, shot a week or so ago
We had Tawny hanging out in our upstairs kitchen and finally noticed him flitting about and clicking, doing his best to poop on things, so I got out some of our house special boiled chinese mealworms and he flew to my hand a number of times and got well-fed, then zoomed off to find shama adventures, and that's not what Sue felt was worth writing about either, since that's about a daily thing.
and another of Tawny from the same batch
No, it was just that to stretch my legs, and Muppet's, I decided to go down the cement stairs to the lower yard, where I hadn't been in a week or so, to see the quiet bower of Avo, Mango, and Breadfruit limbs which is so nice in the trade winds when it hasn't been raining. Muppet always has access but doesn't think the yard is entertaining unless a human is in it somewhere, upon which he ignores them and cavorts about, which he was doing. But as I stood at the base of the steps I saw Bird about 25 feet off the ground in the top of the neighbor's mango tree, surveying things. Not thinking it'd come to much, I held up my right hand with my index finger out and said "hey there, Bird", thinking it'd be cool if he came down. And darned if he didn't, flew about 40 feet straight to my finger and perched there with that perfect balance of his, long tail doing all the balance work. I admitted to him that I hadn't brought any treats. He looked at me for several seconds and then fluffed up his feathers and decided to stay with me awhile, breaking into a full melodious shama song, and he kept it going for 6-7 minutes which seemed like 20. I have no idea what goes on in his little pointed head; whether it was a comradely gesture, whether it's as close to friendship as a shama can get, or whether he was just telling the world that I belonged to him when I was down there, too. Probably the latter, but that sort of thing gets close to my original goal when I told Sue I was going to try to make friends with a shama... that "I want it to fly to me out of the trees when I call it, land on my finger, and sing me beautiful songs". Darned if that doesn't happen now.
Life isn't a disney cartoon, not even close. But there are moments.
Hi, DJ here. This is one of those Hawaii summer days with blue sky, little puffs of white cloud, and trade winds... that is, the standard summer day that the postcards show. And it feels like a good day to be lazy, for some reason, so we're going with it.
Bird, up close & personal
The portraits in this edition are off the DSLR memory card, and are of Bird, shot over the last 6 months or so... there are many more, this is just a selection... since, y'know, each one I use needs to be downsized, cropped, have the levels tweaked, etc for proper internet display.
Overlooking our front yard
Not a lot of unique bird action today inside or outside our house; Birdlet still seems to be taking food from us about once in the morning, after sitting and staring at us and thinking about it for a surprisingly long time. Bird pops by whenever he sees me, and to chase Tawny away on general principles. Tawny is still sneaking in and made it into our upstairs today, doing some aerial acrobatics which impressed Susie; he's now quite aware of how our house works and can navigate it well despite all the panes of glass.
The parent bulbuls are still coming by, and the scruffy baby bulbul has landed a few times and taken food from me directly, shaking his wings in the "feed me" command which is supposed to instill that urge in a parent bulbul.
No wait, we just had a minor bird adventure, related to this post.
skeptically surveying the other birds coming and going,
I figured I'd go back and do a "screen capture" from some old video showing Susie raising "Tweety", a baby bulbul who was rescued from a cat in 1994 and who she brought to full adulthood from being an injured chick, and who we accommodated to being wild again, and who may well be the 20th-generational grandsire of all the bulbuls here today, so if farmers wonder who to thank for ag pests, here we are. And it turns out you can't do mac screen grabs from inside their DVD player, which is a shame since there were some cute ones of Sue at half her current age with a baby bird. But that's not the adventure. The adventure was that the cheeping of the long-ago Tweety on the video seemingly lured the current bulbul chick, Scruffy, into our house where he got trapped in the upstairs by all the windows. So we had to go up and try to gain his trust, which didn't work though he ate some reconstituted mealworms from me... he was covered with cobwebs, apparently turning a baby bulbul loose is a good way to clear them out. But finally I had to just catch him by hand and let him outside, so that unwelcome handling may mean that "Scruffy" doesn't want to be friends anymore.
showing off a vertical stand
We shall see. But his parents, and apparently two other bulbuls outside, were very concerned about him... I didn't know they had extended families... and it looked like all 4 went up to him once he was on a branch outside. So is that the last we'll see of Scruffy, or will the siren song of the mealworms bring him back?
Additional possible bulletin:
Bird took a bug to the nesting box for some reason today. No reason he should, I don't THINK Birdlet is in there, but perhaps they are thinking about more chicks.
DJ here. So not a lot of new bird info today... Bird & Birdlet still stopping by for meals from me, didn't see Tawny today so maybe yesterday was his last visit here. Birdlet still eating light and taking baths all day so that strikes me as vacation mode and not egg-laying mode. They may have put reproduction on the back burner after the failure of the Cuties nesting. I still expect at least one more batch this year, but who knows...
red-whiskered bulbul shot yesterday
I did unexpectedly make friends with a baby red-vented bulbul today, which has been fed by its parents nearby, they have scavenged some of the dropped mealworms and have picked fights with the shamas. But having the baby decide to approach me for food was unexpected, since it's, like, not something a baby bird should do. But it did, and I actually had it sitting on my finger chowing down for about 15 minutes while I talked to it. Again, surprising, since its parents don't trust me and weren't to be seen. But I expect it'll remember me fondly and perhaps within a week it'll have a human-designated name and be insinuating itself into the bird-ape ecosystem. They really aren't as pretty as the other species but they have a lot of personality and talk a lot.
here's the mated pair, shot from my door as they checked me out
this guy has been dashing to our porch and inside briefly
While the baby was on my finger, one of the red-whiskered bulbuls, much smaller and more delicate birds, flew up in front of me and seemed to almost be expecting a turn at what the baby red-vented was having. Which is surprising, too, since those are very shy birds... though they have gotten used to me somewhat in the last couple weeks, they used to light out at the sight of a human. Now they associated me with leftover mealworms and are used to me talking and moving in close proximity to them... and yeah, I actually introduce a lot of sound and movement into my interactions to get them used to the fact I do that, I don't want to have to be a silent statue for them to come around. This isn't something I read anywhere, just comes from being a quasi-autistic little kid who grew up around critters.
this is the mom of the baby bulbul, I have a shot of the baby too but for some reason it won't upload
Anyhow, the reason for posting today is that since I never did wake up all that much today, I pulled the SD card from the DSLR I use to shoot portraits of the birds... a different and more unwieldy camera than the superzoom I normally shoot snaps and vids with. But it has better optics and better imaging chip... so I'll post a few pix here... click them to see them at "full" size... they're downsized a lot from full resolution so they'll load fast but are all at least 1600px wide when you click on them, if your screen will handle that.
The whole notion of blogging is, as I understand it, to write even when there's not much to write about, since chronicling the slow spots is just as valid as hitting the high points.
We're between new batches of chicks now. After the Fluffbutts, there was an attempt to have another batch - tentatively the "Cuties" - in the nesting box, and at least one must have hatched since the parents carried food in there for several days. But seemingly they failed to thrive, perhaps since we were feeding relatively tough reconstituted (boiled) chinese dried mealworms rather than live ones, since our supply of live ones had dwindled during the covid lockdown. This has also coincided with a period of a month or so without heavy rain, which may have cut into the other sources of fresh bugs and worms and stuff out there.
So while last year between March and June we had 4 successful hatchings, which may have been too many, this year the birds seem to be on a slower pace. It could well be that there are already eggs laid in the tree next door, but I tend to doubt it... Birdlet is pretty much in vacation mode, taking a lot of baths and just not acting like anything was urgent.
Bird has been showing up a lot, and has taken to flying into the kitchen and turning loose with his full-volume shama territorial call, which is as loud as a very-loud smoke alarm on steroids. He unquestionably does it to shake us out of whatever we're doing to offer him mealworms, and it works every time.
Bird, who started as the most skeptical of the shamas, and who once spent a night indoors after chasing Cheepy in and getting lost, is now the most chill. The other birds are all hand-trained, but you can kind of infer their level of comfort by how strongly they grip your finger with their claws. Of the current birds, Birdlet hangs on fairly well so she can crank her head around and look around her, Tawny grabs hard since he expects to be chased away by an adult at any time, but Bird doesn't even clench down at all. He sticks his landing on my finger like an olympic gymnast and then keeps his claws entirely relaxed... quite a trick since the way bird sinews are constructed, the weight of a bird contracts the claws on a branch just from the pull of gravity. But bird just balances there using his tail to shift his center of gravity. This despite the fact that not only did he used to hate me as the yard monster, but he's a lot stronger than the other birds. One time a flurry of chicks knocked him back on my finger, and instead of flapping away he just clenched down, and rotated 90 degrees, causing his center claw to slash me as deep as a box cutter would, and about as cleanly other than the presumed horrible bacteria that a hunting carnivore probably has on there. But that was the only time. Also, if the other birds are sitting then and there's some odd sound from in the house, or a passing truck, or Muppet deciding to yell, they will clench down and swivel around. Bird just looks me in the eye and, reassured, goes back to whatever else he was doing. Ever since he originally negotiated his Treaty with me, he doesn't worry about my non-compliance. Have to tell that story sometime.
Bird will eat some radical stuff...here knocking back a venomous centipede in the front yard
But he's reliable if I want a shama... I just open the door and give a brief whistle, and he's there. Yesterday I was reviewing a product Amazon had sent, a bag of black soldierfly larvae. I whistled him up from the backhard and offered him a handful. He regarded them skeptically, though it was clear to him they were being presented as food. Finally he wore me down and I gave him some reheated mealworms. (Neither Birdlet nor Tawny would eat the soldierflies either).
This is "Bird," the Patriarch. In the beginning he was so sure we were monsters that he repeatedly scolded and yelled at us when we were near his chicks. His name became just "Bird" which stuck even though he later shared with us more of his personality. He is bold, curious, demanding and an apex Shama. He has a complex vocabulary and a very strong combative personality to other birds but puts up with us in exchange for a free meal. Now he could care less if we handle his chicks.
Birdlet feeding Peepy1, 2019
Birdlet is the Mom. She is very endearing. She very softly talks to us when she wants us to open the worm bin for her.
We discovered that she raises her girls in a different part of the yard from where Bird brings up the boys. If the clutch is only boys they raise them together, seemingly. (This isn't info from bird researchers, this is our own observation of this mated pair).
This is Eepie 1. Here representing the chicks.
Cheepie - our "special" boy. A favorite
Cheepie was our "special needs" chick. He learned to evade his Dad and stuck around longer than any of the others. Cheepie came in every day to get away from his homicidal dad, to rest and to have snacks. Much time was spent helping Cheepie to eat by pushing food in his mouth, pointing at bugs to get him to recognize them as food, etc. He usually looked a bit ragged which you could see in his tail feathers. Here he is right after growing in his new adult plumage. He still tried desperately to stick around but when the FluffButts fledged he was finally kicked out of his home territory. Hopefully he is doing fine. He had a knack for sitting on clean dishes.
This is a really quick one, but I noticed Birdlet dropping out of the old nesting box on the side of the house today, and there's really no reason for her to be in there unless she's fixing to have more chicks.
not my pic... those old ones are on archived media. Java Sparrows
I built that box back 30+ years ago. There were java rice birds which had pecked the screens out of the vent holes on our upper roof to create a java-rice-bird condo development, you could see a dozen little java faces sticking out the holes sometimes at once. Which was very cute and all, but in Maunawili anything that looks even ROUGHLY like a beehive quickly becomes a beehive. So the bees would chase the java sparrows out of one segment of the roof after another, and I'd have to remove them on a tall ladder, which I was never able to do without killing them. I hated that, but we couldn't really have our drywall ceiling sagging with honey and some night having 50lb of bees crashing through the ceiling to sting us.
So I installed tougher covers on the holes, evicting the java rice birds; but decided to see about making alternate nesting sites for them... so in about 5 minutes I took some rough lumber and a piece of left-over counter laminate and made what I thought would be a good birdhouse for rice birds.
They never cared for it. But over the years I'd notice from time to time a shama nesting there, though I didn't get to know them then, and didn't pay much attention. But that has seemingly become Birdlet's favorite place to nest now, for the cheepies, the fluffbutts, and the failed "cuties", which apparently hatched but didn't thrive. So she may be prepping to try again. I can't tell by the look on her face.
We saw Bird, Birdlet, and Tawny a fair bit today; but no exciting new exploits other than their just dropping by, Tawny coming in the house to lecture us and poop on things.
UPDATE: POK POK POK
Susie has told me I also need to relay a lizard anecdote from the day.
I was moving things around in the lower house today and on barging into the back room scared the pair of gold-dust daygeckos who ran off. These presumably were the ones I'd tried to train in that room a year and a half ago. So as they were running off, I said "what, you don't want a worm?"
Well, BOTH of the lizards stopped running up the wall and behind the curtains and raised their bodies down to stare at me... and they raced each other back toward me. Having not really expected that, I didn't actually have any worms for them. So I told them to wait (they grok that) and went and found some in Susie's mealworm farm. Once I got back they each ran to the arm of the chair closest to me and begged for their mealworms, taking them out of my fingers with a strong tug, and running off giggling. I suppose, whatever a lizard giggle sounds like, we probably couldn't hear it.
But since I now need to find a picture, and can only just now find one, I need to explain it, and that leads to the story of why we no longer have a google robot in that room.
ultimately, I caught him in the act
One of those lizards discovered the touch-sensitive controls on the top of the "smart speaker", and it turns out a gecko's touch is more than sufficient to work it. So this gecko learned that it could make huge noises by moving back and forth between the "volume up" and "volume down" spots. Once on "volume up" it would get as loud as possible and go POK POK POK POK until the lizard got tired of that, which was seldom. We couldn't figure out what was happening for awhile since whenever we'd walk into the room the POK POK POK would suddenly stop, seemingly a ghostly manifestation of some sort. After a few days I opened the door really fast and saw the lizard scooting away right when the noise stopped. Why the lizard liked that, who knows. Maybe it stimulated him or her in some way, it was pretty loud. But the only thing we were sure of what that the neighbors were not happy. They hated the POK POK POK at all hours of the day or night and wanted it off. For awhile I tried taping cardboard to the top of the speaker, but the lizard would wedge under it and POK POK POK POK it would go again. So after the neighbors finally said STOP IT! I unplugged the speaker. So the magic box no longer works for that lizard. But it was one of the ones in my story today, so that's the connection.
