birdies and lesson learned

Inspired by Carolyn's recounting of the squirrels on her campus in OH, I decided to share a bit about the birds here at BYU.

One of my favorite activities is, now, don't judge me till you read to the end, is to mess with birdies' heads. What I do is to imitate their whistle as best as I can. What happens is the bird begins to think there is another bird of the same species nearby, and they start to look around for said bird. I don't think this is cruel - it's just keeping it on its toes.

[Random fact about birds: It may look like the birds' knees bend backwards, but really this is their ankle bone. And their feet are really toes.]

Last Thursday, Lizzy (oboist) and Tony (violinist) ended up eating lunch in the grass. It was a nice break - we were all a bit burned out due to a concert the previous evening involving a fire alarm, and finally getting a grasp on all the work there is to do this semester.

There we were enjoying ourselves, and since I was finishing up my boxed sandwich, I decided to throw a tiny piece of bread towards the cute little sparrows that were frolicking nearby. Needless to say, their cuteness turned into ferociousness. They jumped on that bread so quickly...!

Lizzy and Tony thought it was quite funny, so they added to the mayhem by occassionally throwing fritos at them. There was one little bird that was thrown something specific, but he was always just a bit too slow.

We (Lizzy and I) soon told Tony to stop, because, well, he didn't want to. He enjoyed causing contention in the Sparrow Clan. I admit that I shouldn't have started to feed the cute sparrows after all.