Meerkats and Polar Bears

[pcw_rcw]

One of Richard's sisters, "E", has been a faithful viewer of Meerkat Manor, a real-life animal drama on Animal Planet on TV. [Richard watched it for the first season, but I (Perri) have avoided it because, being a real nature show, I knew that nasty things couldn't help but happen to the meerkats]. Meerkats are charming little creatures which

Comments

[pcw_rcw]

Sorry to hear about your parakeet. When I was growing up, my family had a number of parakeets as pets [as well as canaries and finches, from time to time] but we didn't have much more success than you did. Richard and I stick with cats now.

I've sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a parrot, but they, I understand, require a tremendous amount of personal attention and can live so long that estate planning for them has to be kept in mind unless one is very young indeed. They're supposed to be more intelligent than you would think, but it's difficult to shift through the anecdotal accounts to determine what's real intelligence and what's mimicry--which parrots are very good at, of course.

I suppose it's conceivable that someday Richard and I will go up to Churchill, Canada in the fall to see the gathering of the polar bears there. In the meanwhile I spend hours at the zoo observing the male [one of the two cubs mentioned above] and the female polar bears that the zoo now has. Needless to say, all of the outside enclosures at the zoo have extra security fences, gates, etc., to prevent a re-occurrence of what happened to Chief happening to any other animal.

[smills47]

Do you know about the book (also made into a movie) The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill? There used to be articles periodically in the San Francisco Chronicle about the guy who eventually wrote the book. He has a web site (naturally!) markbittner.net with lots of pictures of the various parrots he befriended.

Our parakeet, I recall, used to only visit his seed cup when we sat down to eat. How did he know that these humongous beakless creatures were engaging in the act of eating? *I* think they really are intelligent!

[pcw_rcw]

Thanks for the recommendation of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. We not only had never heard of this book [or the movie, either, for that matter], but we also didn't know that there were any wild parrots in SF. Sounds interesting--we'll have to run down a copy.

Stranger things have happened in nature than parakeets/parrots being intelligent, so we're perfectly open-minded on the subject. Crows and ravens, for example, are very intelligent birds, so there's no reason that other bird species can't be so as well.