cimorene

A few months ago I was suggested a random video of a balcony full of screaming kookaburras on YouTube and posted to ask my Australian flist if that is a normal or expected Australian occurrence, and from the amusing things they kindly told me about Australian bird life I got interested and did a number of searches on YouTube to see the birds in question...

...and since then YouTube's algorithm has been showing me more and more content related to parrots, in a really delightful instance of the same phenomenon that radicalizes people, I assume. (I'm still not really sure why the original screaming kookaburras showed up, though.)

So far, I have hardly seen anything boring related to parrots in any way, so it's all good! I've learned a lot:

that budgerigars, cockatiels and cockatoos are all members of the parrot family

that cockatoos and budgies talk too, but the smaller the parrot, the weirder it sounds, and the more like you're hearing someone with a throat injury or through a walkie-talkie

that cockatoos are amazingly similar to five-year-old humans and they don't just reproduce speech randomly, they use language to communicate, but in a hilariously weird way that is not the way people (or, say, grey parrots) do

that even budgies can learn enormous vocabularies and construct novel sentences by recombining parts

that kakapos are parrots too but there aren't nearly enough videos of them

I wouldn't say I'm exactly in parrot fandom, but I'm definitely enjoying watching a lot of parrot content at the moment (which is good, because I've been trying to knit and I have not felt emotionally equal to investing myself in the fates of more fictional characters in dramas).

We got the animal blood tester out today, wanting to try to draw Snookums's first 12-hr blood glucose curve, but only then discovered there was a fourth component we needed to have bought separately (a test solution to calibrate the tester with) and didn't. It should be here in a couple more days.