Carol’s my new starling. I’m almost certain she’s a girl, because she has pale gray-blue irises, and one of the few distinguishing marks of adult females, when they’re not in breeding plumage, is the somewhat paler iris. In case I turn out to be wrong, she can always turn out to be Karol.

She’s turning out to have quite a different personality from Arnie. I have to bribe her to sit on my hand, or at least pretend to have some food palmed away. She doesn’t make the same aggressive gestures at my hand, though, beak open and head feathers ruffled, preferring a sharp jab of the beak or a tactical retreat. Might just be because she’s female; I’ll have to check in Feare to see if it’s only males who posture during aggressive encounters.

John gave me a copy of Bernd Heinrich’s Mind of the Raven, which sort of makes me wish I’d adopted a raven, although the food and cleanup are about ten times the responsibility. Interesting thing about ravens is that typically only the dominant males and females vocalize. It’s the dominance calls that distinguish the sexes, too (at least to human eyes and ears), so if you’re not top dog you might have a hard time letting anyone know who you are. Also interesting that males and females have different vocal and gestural vocabularies for aggressive encounters.

Anyway, here she is sitting on top of my computer monitor pretending to be a nightjar.

(cdm | Carol)