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[sartorias]

Reading, Writing, and Birds

Comments

[amyirene_40]

I like crows, but they are not nice birds. Your mother-in-law didn't witness war in the bird world - she saw the crows stopping by the local fast food joint for a quick snack. "Ah, baby birds are ever so tasty, but one does have to get them out of their packaging!" That's why you will sometimes see other birds mobbing a lone crow. They're trying to drive off a predator.

[merriehaskell]

"Nice" doesn't belong in the animal world, anyway. At best, you get "selfless," and that comes usually with an attempt to preserve the genetic line in some fashion. Altruism for non-relatives is largely a human concept, though we've managed to pass it onto some of our domesticated animals (well, dogs).

Scavengers, for some reason, are repulsive to us. Never more so when their opportunism conflicts with our sense of right and wrong; we see it as right to help the helpless, not to eat them. And yet, that's a fairly new concept in human thought. Brought on by having "enough." In some cultures, including cultures directly ancestral to our own, we would have been out there nabbing those babies for soup before the crows could get to them. Some crow baby will do better for his parent's opportunistic behavior as a direct result. Disney's selling of "The Circle of Life" as a happy concept is pretty ironic...

[lnhammer]

It'd be interesting to see Mad Jack Byron in a different direction than as merely Lord Byron's dissolute progenitor.

---L.

[sartorias]

There's reference to some of the crazy Byrons, but O'Brian finesses it, keeping it humorous and strictly off-stage.