Broccoli-Eating Cat and Hermaphroditic Cardinals

 

I double-checked whether I had blogged about either of these subjects and couldn't find any evidence that I have, so here goes. The first subject is about the person who fed their cat broccoli. Someone told me this story years ago, and when I asked if it was even safe for a cat to eat broccoli, the person telling me the story shrugged and said, "The cat lived to be thirty-one." What?!! That is ancient for a cat!! I decided right then that I would eat broccoli daily, and from some of the blog posts I wrote on the subject of broccoli, I see that eating it made my skin clear and my hair bouncy. So why did I stop? Mostly because we now eat kale instead. I think my skin is still fairly clear, but whenever I eat more plant matter, my hair has more volume. For example, yesterday I ate a ton of grapes and blueberries that Travalon brought home from work, and today my hair has so much body. Obviously I am a person who needs to eat ridiculous amounts of fruits and vegetables just to look presentable.

The second subject is the half-and-half cardinal. This is a much more recent story that I read sometime last year, about a cardinal that was half male and half female. There was a photo of it that I have no idea how to share here, where from one side it looked like one gender, and the other from the other side, but from the front you could see the split right down the middle. The explanation seemed to be that there were two embryos in the egg, and they fused. The poor cardinal didn't sing or act like a regular cardinal of either gender, so the other cardinals ignored it, and it led a very lonely existence. This made me so sad! That bird was in Illinois, but apparently a second one was discovered in Pennsylvania, and in this case the female side was the left one, not the right one. That seems to have made all the difference, and this cardinal acted like a regular female and even had a male mate that didn't seem one bit fazed that his wife looked like a husband from some angles. Even more recently a third one had been spotted, but I don't know any details about how that one acts. Scientists are now wondering if this occurs in all sorts of bird species, and we only notice it in cardinals because the genders look so different. Let's face it, if a Canada goose were male on the left half and female on the right half, I wouldn't know. Would you? Maybe that's why some of these Canada geese are all alone - they don't know what they are, and neither do the other geese, just like that poor cardinal in Illinois.

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