He may be having some regrets
Large dog, small, uncomfortable chair.
clever hans | Comment (0)
Animals being clever
Animals can be clever, sometimes coming up with solutions to problems that really quite ingenious. For example, Beau knows he can jump over the baby gate that keeps him in my room during the day (to keep him from setting off the motion detectors on the alarm system), so I raised up the gate. Then he learned to crawl under the gate - sideways - because he is thinner on his side than top to bottom. I lowered the gate enough so he couldn’t crawl under but couldn’t jump over. So he figured out how to stand on the edge of the bed and jump (quite a ways I might add) over the gate. In the end I just had to train him that staying behind the gate was good and that there was nothing fun for him outside of my room (because once he is over, he won’t crawl or jump back into my room on his own). Pretty clever I thought.
So today I was going to the Kroger to stock up on easy veggie meals for finals week when I am not going to be leaving the house much (not that I do right now) and sitting at the stop light I noticed a little purple martin hanging on the end of the light pole. He kept going into the pole, swooping off, and returning back to the pole with a bug in his mouth. If you don’t know, purple martins eat bugs like mosquitos and tend to live near drainage ditches and ponds where the water is still and these insects like to breed. We’re just beginning love bug/mosquito season right now so the grub is available en masse. Because there were no trees nearby the drainage ditch at the intersection I sat at, the martin devised a way to build his next inside the arm of the traffic light pole and was feeding his family buried inside. That way he could be close to the food source, and very much so safely out of the way of predators and competition for space in the trees. That was pretty clever.
On a lighter note, I think animals can be pretty clever when it comes to camouflage too. You know how they say that pets tend to start looking like their owners and vice versa? The classic example being the fat bulldog with droopy jowls and the fat overweight bald-guy with a droopy chin. Well, coming out of the Petsmart on Sunday I saw my old biochemistry prof (a pretty cool guy) who has really red really curly hair. He was with his wife and his two dogs. Two large, standard poodles with poofy curly hair. That looked exactly like his. Pretty clever of those poodles to camouflage themselves, I think. Hehe.
clever hans, musings | Comment (0)