Black Light Birds

My regular readers may remember a few posts ago where I said my interests besides birds included plants, rosaries, and seeing what glows under black lights. Today I made the astonishing discovery that, in fact, BIRDS glow under black lights! Not all birds, but (for example) puffins' beaks, owls' wings, and almost everything on some parrots will light up. In fact, budgies light up like Christmas trees, which I didn't know back when I owned Vladimir and Vabukka, who went on to have seven little budgies. After they died, Kathbert gave me Aenea and Vanya, but I then moved into a non-bird-friendly situation, so Aenea and Vanya went to live with Kathbert's parents, Mombert and Dadbert. It's probably just as well that I didn't know about glowing parakeets when I had parakeets, because if I'd owned a black light at the time, I might have driven them crazy (or even blinded them!) by shining it at them nonstop. Nobody knows why some birds glow under black lights, since as far as anyone knows, birds don't have black light technology, but they do have a lot more visual acuity than we do and can see colors in the ultraviolet end of the spectrum. Scientists speculate that this is how many birds tell what gender another bird is, since they do not have a good sense of smell (which is how most mammals figure it out), and in the range of light visible to humans, they look identical. Seriously, can you tell a male Canada goose from a female one? But they seem to have no problems in that regard, so maybe what looks like gray and black and white to us is a riot of colors in shades we can't even imagine, and if we could see ultraviolet colors, it would be obvious to us too. So birds are more ready for the rave than mammals, because they not only have an excellent sense of rhythm, but some of them bring their own glow sticks.

Speaking of birds, I had seen orioles in my walks around the neighborhood, so I meant to get an oriole feeder to hang off our balcony. I had never seen one from our balcony, however, until yesterday, when one landed on the hummingbird feeder, got frustrated, and flew off. Now I feel bad for giving it false hope, and I am twice as determined to put up an oriole feeder. Will the oriole give us a second chance?

Famous Hat