Birds in San Francisco

After the ffrf convention, I had two days in San Francisco. My friend and I went to the Legion of Honor art museum on Monday. It was great - Rodin's Thinker and lots of very good art. Also some odd art - some very oddly-proportioned saints and such. After a while, we got a snack and ate outside on the terrace. There were trees and a net overhead - but there were gaps along the edges and the terrace was filled with birds.


Well, not filled, but a nice little flock of around twenty. They were very tame - or maybe not tame, but not overly cautious, either. They fluttered around, walking on the tables and under the chairs, hunting for crumbs and pieces of bread. (The staff at the museum obviously kept on top of it, because the tables and chairs were clean.) I had never seen them before - or perhaps I had; I did live in Monterey for a few years. But that was more than 20 years ago, and I didn't recognize these birds. For a while I thought they might two different kinds, but then I thought probably not, since they were basically the same shape and behavior, just different colors. One set was brownish with gray trim and dark brown eyes; the others were shiny black with pale yellow eyes. I have since looked them up and discovered they're a Western bird - Brewer's blackbird, and I was right in my second guess; the yellow-eyed ones are the males.

It's very strange, how important eyes are. Remember in 'Jaws', when Quint was talking about the shark attack he lived through? "The thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes after you, he doesn't seem to be living until he bites you, and those black eyes roll over white..." Animals that usually have "warm brown eyes" seem odd or even sinister when their eyes are blue (cats are exempted from this because they often have colored eyes.) Horses like this are called "wall-eyed" because in horse fairs that eye was put next to the wall to hide it... Even showing white in the eye, as Appaloosas do, looks odd - though cartoon animals almost always do, to make them seem more human-like. In this picture, the blackbird doesn't seem strange, but in real life, with a dozen or so of them hopping about and staring at us, they seemed a little menacing in a way the brown-eyed ones didn't.

Then a male showed up who was lame - I don't know if he was crippled or just temporarily injured, but he was hopping on one foot, barely touching the toe-tip of his other foot to the ground. Of course, we were all "Awww, poor lame one!" and tossing crumbs in his direction, completely ignoring his sinister eyes. He could usually grab a bite or two before some healthy male ran him off - they were always puffing themselves up and darting at each other - so I finally tore off a biggish hunk and waited till he was by himself and tossed it to him. He grabbed it in his beak and flew off to hide under a shrub, unnoticed.

"You're subverting Darwin," my friend said. I told her I didn't care, but thinking about it, I've decided if he's adapted to humans, well, that's his new ecological niche, after all. And if he's only injured, why shouldn't he get through it?

At any rate, he had a nice snack for a change, and the others weren't exactly going to starve.