Another day with IGGY

So this morning after breakfast and before camp Iggy and I decided it was high time to clean the wooden Chinese bird cage that has been hanging from the kitchen ceiling for the past 20-odd years. Collecting dust and dead bugs, especially dead stink bugs. There has never been an actual bird inside the bird cage, but there is a petrified baby alligator head, an oropendola nest, some fake brown and white eggs and a couple fake birds with wire talons, clinging to the outside of the bird cage.
I am not sure whether the reptilian head in question is mummified or petrified or just freeze-dried, but I do know that it was once alive. Because I told Iggy so.
“Nana, is this real?”
“Definitely,” I said. “It’s dead now. But it was once alive, entirely.”
“But not the eyeballs,” Iggy said. “They’re marbles. Of course. If they were real crocodile eyeballs, or any type of eyeballs, they would stink! I’m warning ya!”
“I stand warned,” said. “But we still don’t know if this was a crocodile or an alligator. Or something else.”
“If we see his teeth when he closes his mouth, then it’s an alligator,” Iggy said. “With crocodiles, the teeth stick out.”
“I don’t see your teeth when your mouth is shut, so you must be an alligator,” I said.
“But Nana, I’m not a reptile!”

Then I told Iggy that, according to a show about entomophagy that I heard on NPR, the absolute worst tasting insect of all the possible insects to eat, is a live stink bug.
He considered this. “But I know a bug that tastes like pizza.”
“Seriously?”
“It has a white body, - the whole body is white - and then a red face. With one big eye. I think it is a grub. Yes! That’s it, a straight-up grub. And it tastes like pizza.”

It just so happens that today is Pizza Friday at Hastings Day Camp.

Conversational bubbling and a few gurgles, pendant

Because there were so brilliantly noisy, and ever-present, and because they were kind enough to build their colony of hanging nests (referred to as the “testicles of God” by the ineffably epithetic RB) right in the garden at Aquiares, on the upper reaches of a beautiful ceiba (kapok) tree, I have become a devout aficionado of Montezuma oropendolas, with all the excessive piety of a recent convert.

First I had to learn to spell their name properly: it is one word, oropendOla, not oropendUla, as I had always assumed, based on the hanging nature of their nests. (from the Latin, pendulus, pendere.)

Then I wanted to get an oropendola song (“a conversational bubbling followed by loud gurgles”) on my phone to use as a ringtone, and to that end I downloaded a couple of free birdsong apps. Neither of them had oropendola songs, and in fact they seemed pretty useless. But most disturbing: having opened the Bird Sound App, an ad kept appearing at the top of the screen, and also in the middle, for “The Gentle Goodbye….Let us give your pet a peaceful death - At-Home- Pet - Euthanasia.” Seriously. This ad kept appearing and re-appearing.
I just have to think it is very creepy. Either my phone (i.e. Google/ Big Brother) knows that Bruno is demented and incontinent, and there seems no reason why my phone should know this, OR, this is just a random ad that strikes a rather painful chord here. In which case, it is a very odd choice for a random ad. What if I have no pet? What if my pet is alive and well? What if I don’t believe in euthanasia? Is there some reason why someone interested in bird sounds would also be seeking to kill her dog? There are so many reasons why this ad is a bad idea.

So for now, my ringtone is a loon.

Photo by Roger Bruce.