Igon and the Joy of Overacting

There’s a guy in the Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree named Igon, who is just deeply hilarious.  The first time you become aware of him, he’s yelling and moaning in the distance.  As you approach, you find a crippled guy laying in a heap, alternating between over-wrought sobs and wailing about his agony, and thunderous self-righteous rage at the enemy who has laid him low.  CURSE YOU BAYLE!  oh, take mercy upon my broken body, do not savage me so.

Overacting is really good for a laugh.  Maybe I’d feel differently if I was drowning in it; I only see it occasionally.  This clip from the old cartoon Home Movies illustrates:

What can I say?  Me like funny voice.

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Life List: Wilson’s Warbler

You know how they have birding apps where you can record bird calls, and have them identified?  Great.  And how people would play recordings of calls off their phones to attract birds and get a better look at them?  Not cool.  Scientists have said “stop doin’ that.”  I knew of these things.  But still…

One day I got “Merlin” from Cornell Labs on my phone and used it to ID all the birds I couldn’t see at West Hylebos Wetlands Park.  Some of those birds I have, to this day, never seen – only heard.  There were at least three species of warbler alone that showed in the recordings, plus all sorts of other beasties.

Warblers are tiny passerine / perching birds, which mostly come in combos of yellow black and white, with some green made by combining black and yellow, grey from combining black and white.  The yellowest warbler is just straight yellow, and wilson’s adds to this a jaunty little black cap.  The black cap of a black-capped chickadee doesn’t look very cap-like because it attaches to and mirrors the black on their chins.  The black cap on wilson’s warbler looks very cap-like, or maybe like a little hairdo, because the rest of the bird’s head is very bright yellow.

Warblers have a more “hunched” look than chickadees, almost like they’re shading toward the body language of trunk-climbing birds – creepers and nuthatches – but they’re not all the way there yet.  They’re shy enough I’ve almost never seen them, hiding in summer foliage of bushes and short trees.

On the occasion of first getting Merlin and seeing it recognize all the calls, I was quite excited.  Also frustrated that I couldn’t see any of the birds, but pleased to know they were out there.  When it IDs a bird, you can click a little information profile on them.  That profile includes a few pictures, and also some sample calls you can play back.  I didn’t even think about it before pressing play, and a wilson’s warbler appeared in the trees nearby.

The sun was shining in the fresh green leaves, making them appear yellow.  The bird was just about the same size as the leaves, and you wouldn’t think bright yellow good camouflage, but it was.  Only the movement and song caught my eye.  Was it looking for a lover or flexing on a rival?  I don’t know, but I do know I was wasting its precious calories.  But damn, that’s a cute little bird.

Anyway, I couldn’t resist.  I tried to summon some other species by playing their songs, to no avail.  I’m naughty, but at least I had the decency to not play the wilson’s song again.  Give ’em a break.  And since that day, I have not done that again.

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Life List: White Pelican?

My brother was living in Kansas with wife and kid.  He helped with air fare so I could visit.  His favorite thing  is going to zoos, so we went on big long car rides to visit Wichita and Kansas zoos.  During one of these rides, in the great distance, flying over those “amber waves of grain,” I saw a lone, massive, white bird.  Based on an impression of its form and flight, I decided it was a white pelican – the only one I’ve ever seen, assuming the ID was even right.

I’ve only ever seen the smaller brown pelican on a trip to Ocean Shores, a tourist spot in my state.  They looked like pterosaurs in flight, and I saw a few very long flight feathers shed on the beach.  Very cool.  But I never have gotten a close-up look at a pelican, even though it’s apparently a pretty easy thing to do.  In internet videos they do not seem at all shy.

Like the herons I mentioned, pelicans are ridiculous eaters.  You can find videos of them eating random birds the size of their own heads, trying to eat things that won’t even fit down their own elastic gullets, or just staring menacingly at humans, as if to say “give up the goods.”  Not every creature needs to be thinking deep thoughts.  That’s fine.  Live to eat, if you will.  If they were about anything other than cramming stuff in their throat, what would that even be?  Pelican poetry.

Not much to say; this bird was a glimpse.

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Life List: Eurasian Collared Dove

I tend to be lumpy on some of these bird posts.  Taxonomy is the practice and study of putting names to things in nature that do not truly have hard boundaries – deciding what does and doesn’t constitute a genus, species, etc.  Because law is involved in conservation and law requires extremely specific language, how one practices taxonomy can make a big difference in the survival of a given population of organisms.

This is worsened by the triage mode for ecology, that the interests of all life on earth are secondary to human greed, so we have to decide what are acceptable losses to that greed.  Feels like a trolley thing.  Trolley will eat everybody and everything, but if you define this one creature as being special enough that the trolley will allow it to exist as an inbred population in petting zoos, it may be spared.  Maybe we’re extremely past due to dismantle trolleys.

Wait, I was going to explain lumpy.  Lumping is deciding two populations of an organism are not distinct enough to be categorized as separate species.  Splitting is deciding that a given population of organisms has sub-groups distinct enough they should be regarded as separate species.  This happens at other –more obsolete– Linnaean ranks as well.  Where it applies to my posts is that I’m tending to mention more than one species in a go, and as we see with my last post, this can group them by species in a way the animals don’t necessarily deserve.  I named my post for glaucous-winged gulls, but will olympic and western gulls get an equal treatment at any point?  Unlikely.

Today I split, and let a related species stand apart.  I gave feral domestic pigeons a post; now I bring you a wild cousin of theirs that has also become an invasive species in North America – the eurasian collared dove.  As part of the human-induced global biotic interchange, they are surely a problem for some precious local species they out-compete.  I don’t know enough to say who that is, but they don’t seem very numerous, and they’re shy around humans.  I hear them far more than I see them, and I don’t hear them very often.

Eurasian collared doves look and sound similar to mourning doves, but don’t have spots, and they have a black semi-collar around the back of the neck.  They even have white tail feather tips accentuated by a band of black, just like mourning doves.  We don’t get mourning on this side of the state, so it’s nice to get something similar.  In my experience, they spend most of their time very high up in trees, coming down to the ground or low bushes to feed, when nobody is paying too close of attention.  They sing like the world’s most pathetic incels, and the sad cooing has a remarkable ability to carry over distance, and penetrate the weatherproofing of my condo – reach me while I’m washing dishes.  I love the sound.

I first saw them at my workplace’s old location, in the beautiful suburban fields with sparse tall trees.  They were pretty close, but I didn’t get a very good look before they fled to the treetops.  Since then, I’ve tracked their call to the tallest trees near my home.  They’re around.

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about them, for lack of direct experience with them.  They’re new to me.  Feel free to drop your hot ECD goss in the comments.

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