There was a time many years ago when the man who would become my husband came up with a plan to make a little money. He and his roommate decided to raise turkeys — thinking they would be cheap and easy.
It did not go well.
As it turns out, turkeys are dumb. And not just a little dumb, no. Turkeys are catastrophically dumb. As in keeping them alive is a monumental challenge, kind of dumb. Turkeys are an abomination of creation: they will make you doubt the plausibility of natural selection. Nothing so dumb should be permitted to survive, except to sustain something more useful.
My husband recalls his peak moment as an amateur turkey farmer; he watched as one of his birds drowned itself in its own water dish. He swears that this is true. He watched the bird stretch down to take a drink, get stuck under the water, and die.
All in all, my husband lost nine of his 20 turkeys.
You should never feel guilty about an animal that is too dumb to pull its own head out of a shallow water dish. Poultry is God’s tofu.
Jen Gerson, “Done with the political turkeys after the holidays”, CBC News, 2021-01-04.
December 20, 2021
QotD: Turkeys
June 7, 2021
QotD: Toronto in summertime
On the other hand, the raccoon population appears to be dwindling. It would seem that the skunks are driving them away. Perhaps they will turn on the coyotes, next.
The geese and swans along the Lakefront are also acting unionized, having long nursed a powerful dislike for the city’s other inhabitants. They are large, and forceful in expressing their opinions. Ditto, the trolley drivers. And the schoolchildren are about to be released from their cages, in time for what is now called “Canada Day.” Monstrous little creatures in the main, especially after they have shot up their drugs. (The older-looking ones are their teachers.)
David Warren, “Sumer is icumen in”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-06-16.
October 28, 2012
Toronto accused of being deadly waypoint for migratory birds
In the New York Times, Ian Austen examines claims that Toronto’s downtown core is taking a huge toll of migratory birds every year:
There is no precise ranking of the world’s most deadly cities for migratory birds, but Toronto is considered a top contender for the title. When a British nature documentary crew wanted to film birds killed by crashes into glass, Daniel Klem Jr., an ornithologist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., who has been studying the issue for about 40 years, directed them here, where huge numbers of birds streaking through the skies one moment can be plummeting toward the concrete the next.
“They’re getting killed everywhere and anywhere where there’s even the smallest garage window,” Professor Klem said. “In the case of Toronto, perhaps because of the number of buildings and the number of birds, it’s more dramatic.”
So many birds hit the glass towers of Canada’s most populous city that volunteers scour the ground of the financial district for them in the predawn darkness each morning. They carry paper bags and butterfly nets to rescue injured birds from the impending stampede of pedestrian feet or, all too often, to pick up the bodies of dead ones.
The group behind the bird patrol, the Fatal Light Awareness Program, known as FLAP, estimates that one million to nine million birds die every year from impact with buildings in the Toronto area. The group’s founder once single-handedly recovered about 500 dead birds in one morning.
Rob Silver finds the claim to be a bit unlikely:
If 9 million birds die in Toronto due to accidents with towers each year, it means 24,657 each day (on avg). I call BS. http://t.co/stOl6Cqe
— Rob Silver (@RobSilver) October 28, 2012
September 10, 2009
I guess they can update RFC1149 now
I guess that this story means they’ll have to update the old RFC 1149: Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avia:
Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery — but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.
A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.
Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles — in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.
Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm’s slow internet speeds.
