@magic-and-moonlit-wings / magic-and-moonlit-wings.tumblr.com
1928 c. Henrich Hoffman uranium glass pin tray "Girl in Pool". From Art Deco, FB.
I love her, I don't care if she has a high body count
I mistook the shading of the glass for a hummingbird's beak and immediately thought of the parrot-head lady painted by Omar Rayyan:
Found a dozen eggs in the middle of the woods. Still cold even though it's a hundred degrees outside. Is this a faerie trick?
My coworkers to me this morning: Oh, glad to see you're still alive!
Me: After getting stung by wasps?
Them: No, after eating Bush Eggs.
excuse me tumblr user Draconym? you belong to the Fae now
I didn't eat all twelve eggs because I gave one to my bird; surely that should protect me at least somewhat from being bound by the Fairy Queen?
Everyone's supportive when life gives you lemons but then as soon as the forest starts handing out eggs everybody's a critic
I laughed so hard at this. The Fae are probably just standing there with their mouths open and the sheer and beautiful audacity of you feeding their ‘gift’ failed trap to your beautiful birb.
i’d say that since op only ate 11/12 they belong to the fae 11 months of the year, the other month is when they get op’s bird
I give it a week before the fae send him back
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“This is a tapestry I made myself! I just finished it!”
“…. this is…. big.”
“Eighty feet long, ten high, in forty panels! It was originally going to be sixty feet, but then the Thomas Malory Arthuriana got big and I had to put more stuff in.”
“… Malory published in the fifteenth century.”
“Do you have any idea how long it takes one person to embroider eight thousand square feet of tapestry?”
“You’ve had a lot of free time in the last eight hundred years, haven’t you?”
“Not once I took up embroidery as a hobby, no!”
#the true cost of immortality #if you can buy any and all craft supplies confident in the knowledge that you WILL use them eventually #your ominous gothic mansion will eventually be like 90% storage and workshop space #‘and here in the east wing we have the yarn and fabric storage; the sewing atelier; the Hall of Looms #while of course the letterpresses and metalsmithing are in the dungeon’ #‘oh yes i used to have a formal dining room with a super long table down the middle but i wanted to try glassblowing’ (tags from nonasuch)
Kakapo
I think one of the funniest things I’ve accidentally taught my parrot is yelling “WHAT?” The best part is that if he says something weird and and someone else says “what???” he usually repeats what he just said. Like just now, I was cooking in the kitchen and he heard me boiling water so he asked “you wanna noodle?” but I couldn’t quite hear him so I yelled “WHAT” and he repeated “you wanna noodle?”
Mostly he just likes yelling it, though.
Less funny things I’ve accidentally taught my parrot:
……LESS funny??!??????
Found a dozen eggs in the middle of the woods. Still cold even though it's a hundred degrees outside. Is this a faerie trick?
My coworkers to me this morning: Oh, glad to see you're still alive!
Me: After getting stung by wasps?
Them: No, after eating Bush Eggs.
excuse me tumblr user Draconym? you belong to the Fae now
I didn't eat all twelve eggs because I gave one to my bird; surely that should protect me at least somewhat from being bound by the Fairy Queen?
Everyone's supportive when life gives you lemons but then as soon as the forest starts handing out eggs everybody's a critic
I laughed so hard at this. The Fae are probably just standing there with their mouths open and the sheer and beautiful audacity of you feeding their ‘gift’ failed trap to your beautiful birb.
i’d say that since op only ate 11/12 they belong to the fae 11 months of the year, the other month is when they get op’s bird
I give it a week before the fae send him back
Almost like...cooperation is a fundamental instinct on Earth.
I think there’s a correlation between the capacity for generosity and the capacity for complex/abstract thought. This reminds me of another experiment I read about, with crows. (Sorry, couldn’t find the original study.)
Scientists trained a crow to use a wire to get a piece of meat out of a bottle, proving the crow could tell it needed a straight wire rather than one bent in half in order to reach the meat. Then they had two crows, two bottles with meat inside, and two wires, one straight and one bent. Instead of fighting over the straight wire, the two crows unbent the other wire and both retrieved the meat from the bottles.
Sometimes I have an entire conversation with Ripley before stepping back and realizing how cool that is.
I arrive home late from a potluck and the house is dark. From the bottom of the stairs I say, "Hey Ripley, I'm back."
"Wanna come out," he answers, which is a pretty standard reply when I first get home. It's midnight, way past his bedtime, but he hasn't been out of his cage at all today because we're dog sitting my mom's very untrustworthy dog (with whom Ripley is unfortunately fascinated). So I say, "Sure."
As I walk into his room he lifts up a foot in a way I recognize as meaning "I'm ready to step onto your hand," so as I open his door I say, "Let's go in the kitchen." I offer him the chance to poop in the trash can, but he declines with a small clicking noise. I ask him if he would sit on a chair, but warn him that first I need to move Coat Shirt off of it (shirt is his catch-all word for clothing), and he makes a little "hm" of acknowledgment.
After he steps onto the back of the chair I say, "I've gotta go downstairs, can I leave you up here for a minute?"
"Okay," he answers as I leave the room.
Upon returning I say, "Thanks for waiting in here." It's taken years of practice for me to talk to Ripley like he's a person (he is), but now it's second nature. He gets insistent if I'm quiet for too long.
"Do want a carrot," Ripley says, leaning toward the fridge.
"I can get you a carrot." My usual reply when he asks for a healthy food. I hand him a baby carrot from the fridge.
He takes a couple bites and shakes the carrot around gingerly in his foot. "I like it."
"I'm glad. Can I touch you?" I reach out to pet his back but he gives me a subtle look: a twitch of his pupils and a fractional declination of his head that means "no thank you." Ignoring this is a serious offense.
"Okay, no touch. A kiss, then?" He leans toward me and squints: an invitation. As I lean back, he makes a trilling sound and smushes the top of his head against my face. "Thank you," I say.
After several more kisses I ask him what kind of bedtime treat he wants. "A peanut."
A lot of our conversation is verbal, sure, but a good deal of it is also nonverbal. Most parrots don't talk, but all of them communicate with their flock in very precise, intentional ways.
My parrot Ripley has been saying "red shirt" at me all evening and I've been correcting him by saying "no, I'm wearing a black shirt." But it's just dawned on me that in Ripley's lexicon, "shirt" means "any article of clothing, and also feathers."
And I'm wearing red shorts.
So I grabbed a peanut, then walked over to his perch and said, "hey, can you touch the red shirt?" and he immediately reached over and grabbed the hem of my shorts.
Sometimes the animal is right and the trainer is wrong!
I would like to adopt another parrot someday, but I think it would be very strange to adopt something older than you. Parrots can live to be 60+, so I could someday be the guardian of an animal who lived a few decades before I was even born and that’s just weird.
I don’t think I have the authority. By default, that bird should be my guardian.
I am totally down for my next rescue to be older than me cuz frankly I need the life advice
My friend works at a pet store and while they don’t sell parrots, they do board and occasionally take in rescues and adopt them out. Well one of the birds they were boarding for a month was a 60+ year old scarlet macaw who knew one phrase besides occasionally coughing like an old man. She would say it on cue whenever a customer approached her and an employee told them how old she was. She would stop what she was doing, lean in close, her eyes pinning wildly, in a raspy whisper she would utter, “I was there when it happened.”
I feel like… Anyone who tries to outlaw abortion should be legally required to raise a parrot
“This is a lifetime commitment I didn’t ask for!” Yeah, so is a baby. “It’s loud and my neighbors hate me!” Baby. “I was never trained how to raise an exotic bird! I have no idea what I’m doing!” Baby. “It’s expensive! It’s intelligent! It yells swears at top volume and bites me when its mad! I have three kids and a full time job, I don’t have time for a high maintenance pet!” ….Baby
Don’t forget to give the parrot legal human status so if they don’t take care of it they go to jail
This isn’t fair to parrots
I mean, that is kind of the point. If you wouldn’t force a parrot to spend decades of its life with a caretaker who fundamentally resents their existence and has neither the emotional nor financial capacity to care for them in the way they deserve, or being constantly uprooted and shuffled from household to household as successive caretakers burn out, then, uh… that has implications for the kind of life you want for kids.
My parrot has a vague understanding of the word “no.” He knows to stop doing what he’s doing when he hears it, and he knows how to say it.
He knows it’s a word that is used when he’s doing something he shouldn’t be doing. However, being told “no” doesn’t make him stop doing it in future.
If he’s ever out of my sight or if I’m not paying attention, I know exactly when he’s doing something bad.
Because he says “no” to himself as he does it.
