News from the Menagerie

Poststructural Pub
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First of all, please let me apologize for the length and “nature documentary” feel to this post. We just finished the homeschool year and the kid is on break for 2 weeks. I don’t have anybody to lecture to and I’m feeling a bit lost :laughing:

We have a pet starling

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named Izzie, who can imitate some spoken phrases.
He says “Hey buddy” “Whatcha doin’” “I’m a starling” etc.

Kevin says to me today, “Hey, guess what! Izzie has a new favorite saying. He said it about five times while you were out.”

me – “What is it?”
K – “That’s right!”
me – “He says ‘that’s right’? That’s so cute!”
K – “No! What is it!”
me – “That’s what I was asking you.”
K – “He says ‘what is it’.”
me – “Ohhhhh!!”

Starlings are insectivores (more or less) and if they don’t get enough protein (33 %) they can’t absorb other nutrients. Then they start to get vitamin deficiencies. We found this out when Izzy started to stand on one leg all the time.

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If you Google “starling with sore foot” right away you find “hyperkeratosis, a vitamin A deficiency”. OK! Now we know what to do.

Izzie’s favorite insectivore chow “Bugs’n’Berries”

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turned out to have only 18 % protein so we’re trying to find ways to bump up the protein level. So…I’m looking into different kinds of “live food” (which is a euphemism for bugs that you can raise in your house).

Mealworms are easy, but they’re awfully fatty.

Izzie’s favorite insect treat is a nice juicy moth. High in protein, low in fat! So two weeks ago I ordered a small shipment of silkworm caterpillars,

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which in a few weeks will grow into silkworm moths.

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The caterpillars eat fresh mulberry leaves, or expensive silkworm chow made from mulberry leaves,

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…those are the only choices. They’re so domesticated that they need their food delivered right to them. When they’re hungry they rise up like sphinxes and wave pitifully back and forth. If the food is even 5 inches away they will starve to death!

Other times they do a stationary sphinx stance because they are about to shed their skins. Then they mustn’t be disturbed. So here I am staring at this colony of caterpillars all posed like sphinxes, and I have to figure out, are they hungry (and if I don’t feed them soon they’ll die) or are they about to molt (and if I touch them they might die)?

Arrgh!

I’ve gotten so disgusted with the silly things that I don’t know if I’ll have patience to raise them into moths. Maybe the starling would eat them directly as caterpillars? Caterpillars are bugs, right?..So I put a silkworm caterpillar in the starling’s cage, and Izzie comes down and stares at it in apparent horror as it waves pitifully back and forth. Then Kevin sees what I’m doing and says “No! Don’t feed it to the bird!!” and puts it back in the colony.

I guess they’ve become pets :swear:

BTW, This is an absolutely fantastic website by a guy who raises his own silk, then weaves with it. He has wonderful photos of his weaving projects, his silkworms, and other moths he’s raising too.

http://www.wormspit.com/index.htm

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More live food : I also sent away for a colony of “flightless fruit flies”. This isn’t the usual Drosophila melanogaster, it’s D. hydei, about 3 times bigger. Oooh! Izzie likes those! although they’re pretty small, sort of like a raisin would be to us.

So I’m trying to raise a lot of them.

You can buy fruit fly chow, but it’s expensive,

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so I found some recipes online. You make a sort of stiff pudding with some sugar, some form of starch, some vinegar (the acid helps keep it from getting moldy) and some yeast. An over-ripe banana is nice too. You put the pudding in the bottom of, say, a canning jar, and use the metal ring of the canning jar to hold fabric mesh on the top.

Most of the recipes for fruit fly pudding recommend using powdered potato flakes as the starch because you can add as much as you need to get the pudding to just the right consistency.

My husband was going to the grocery store so I said “While you’re there, could you please get some potato flakes for the fruit fly colony?”

He came home w/ instant potatoes au gratin :laughing:

I also started a colony of “Phoenix Worms” …which are just a fancy kind of maggot
http://www.mulberryfarms.com/phoenix.htm

The flies, called Black Soldier Flies, look like small wasps.
They are harmless (can’t eat, have no mouthparts) and live only a few days.

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Turns out they are wonder composters! They’re often found “wild” in compost heaps.
They’re happy to be vegetarians, but they’ll handle other kinds of waste too. Research is being done to see if they could be used as a tool in sustainable farming practices.
http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/waste_mgt/smithfield_projects/soldier%20fly/soldier_fly.htm

They will turn all sorts of animal and plant waste into a product (the cocoon-like pupal form) that’s 35% oil. Then this could be rendered into biofuel!

Here they are making short work of some fish scraps. Warning, not for the squeamish!
http://forum.nanfa.org/index.php?showtopic=4108

I’ve become so excited about these things that I may have to get one of these…

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I’m curious. Why is the moth wearing all of the eye shadow?

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meal worms…

ah, yes…

Takes me back to the time when we had a couple of red earred sliders. The ex (wasn’t the ex then) decided to raise meal worms to feed them. Thing is, he didn’t tell me he was doing that. In the box of oatmeal. In the cabinet in the kitchen.

So, I go to make oatmeal cookies…


Well, you can figure out the rest.



So far Izzy sounds like our home remodelling progects - you know, you start one little thing like replacing the washer in a faucet, and it turns into completely redoing the bathroom.

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Scares the birds away?

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How far did you get before you realized you had, uh, extra protein in your oatmeal? :boggle: :stuck_out_tongue:

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I love starlings. They’re so smart and yet so stupid at the same time, kind of like the dalmatians of the bird world. :slight_smile:

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I have a mixed dalamatian. You got that right. I had no clue a dog could be clumsy.

Getting back to the starling, was that a wild bird? I don’t mean to start WWIII here or anything but did you find it abandoned or something? I always just let nature run it’s course. That whole circle of life thing.

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Now, THERE’S a cool irony.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/01/opinion/100-years-of-the-starling.html

The year was 1890 when an eccentric drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin entered New York City’s Central Park and released some 60 European starlings he had imported from England. In 1891 he loosed 40 more. Schieffelin’s motives were as romantic as they were ill fated: he hoped to introduce into North America every bird mentioned by Shakespeare.

Izzie (as are all North American starlings) is descended from caged birds that came over from Europe on a ship.

Best wishes,
Jerry

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Yup – the neighbor lady found him in the middle of the parking lot at work. He was too young to walk or fly at that point, and wouldn’t have made it.

I always just let nature run it’s course. That whole circle of life thing.

Yeah, makes sense – but starlings are different - they’re related to mynah birds and have been kept as pets for hundreds of years. Probably the most famous one was Mozart’s starling -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart's_starling

For about three years the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart kept a pet starling. The first record of the starling is the entry Mozart made in his expense book when he bought it on 27 May 1784:

The music Mozart jotted down in the book is fairly close to the opening theme of the third movement of his Piano Concerto No. 17 in G, K. 453, which Mozart had completed a few weeks earlier (12 April).[2] Mozart presumably taught the bird to sing this tune in the pet store, or wherever it was that he bought it. According to Mozart’s transcription, the starling incorrectly inserted a fermata on the last beat of the first full measure, and sang G sharp instead of G in the following measure.

Mozart probably was not joking when he made the transcription, because starlings are known to have a very strong capacity for vocal mimicry.[3]

The bird Mozart brought home lived as a pet in his household for three years and died on 4 June, 1787. Mozart buried the creature in the back yard and wrote a commemorative poem for the occasion. Deutsch 1965 calls the poem “serio-comic”. However, West and King note, based on their extensive experience, that starling pets interact closely with their human keepers, often causing their owners to bond with them. Thus, Mozart’s expression of sorrow may have been quite sincere.

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How about crickets? They’re readily available at pet stores and probably as satisfyingly expensive as your other yummies!

Here, you could just go stand outside for a while and slap down what lands on you. I recognize that you’re not as fortunate. :wink:

Could you explain your plight to a natural food store and see if they’ll save some bug-infested grain for you? Go out with a net and swipe up what clusters around the porch light? Round up some Japanese beetles from the garden? Lay a board on some moist earth overnight, then flip it over in the morning and collect what’s under it? Go to the woods and look under downed branches and rocks?

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oh-oh - you could borrow our old bug zapper if Izzy likes his bugs “grilled”!!!





As to dalmatians - Flydood and I could share quite a few stories with you on them…

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OK, starlings may be an exception to letting nature run it’s course.

OK, one more story about my mixed dalmation, THE dullest tool in a toolshed. Even a picture of a fence can keep her effectively contained. We’ve lived in our suburban neighborhood for 10 years. We walk this two block self-contained neighborhood every day except the days it rains. There are days she runs away and still gets lost but she must have paid attention one day in puppy class before we got her because she’ll sit still once she gets lost. She sat still in our next door neighbor’s yard for hours one day. Our backyards have a common fence so she couldn’t get into our yard that way and could not figure out that she could have just walked into our front yard. Good thing she’s pretty.

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Since the kid is on vacation, I have no teaching responsibilities for a week or so
…thanks for letting me get all this lecturing out of my system :blush:

Well, I think you can tell that our birdie is almost as spoiled as Mutey’s dog… :smiley:

and also that I enjoy fussing over the fruit flies and silkworms, even though I’m complaining about it.
Actually I enjoy the complaining, too :laughing:

Crickets? (sigh) I had big hopes for the pet store kind.
He chased them very excitedly, grabbed them, chewed them up a bit and then spat them out. He also doesn’t like these

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which is very disappointing because our basement is full of them!
Earwigs, stink bugs, beetles – nope.
He hasn’t been stung by a bee or wasp yet, so he eagerly eats syrphid flies and robber flies.

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http://bugguide.net/node/view/151


Butterflies, a very enthusiastic yes. I have some pics of Izzy chowing down on a Tiger Swallowtail (won’t post here, they’re kind of gruesome ). He swallows them head end first, wings and all. It would be like swallowing an entire head of curly endive. :boggle:

Carpenter ants get a very excited reaction – the first few he eats and the rest he “ants” with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anting_(bird_activity)
He also ants with soap suds, diet soda, and vinegar. You have to shoo him off your salad with vinagrette dressing!

As for outside bugs – it’s gross but kinda interesting – a lot of them carry their own internal parasites. Ex. flies carry gapeworm larvae, and earthworms and slugs carry other kinds of worms. We’ve had to treat him for gapeworm a couple of times.

He really is a great “science project”. Up to this point we’ve had budgies, cockatiels and society finches, all seed-eaters. The attitude and behavior of an insect-chasing bird is totally different.

Then there’s the whole “the more varied my song, the sexier I am to the ladies” thing. He learns a new phrase every few weeks. The new phrase gets a lot of practice the first few days. Right now I’m listening to “What is it? What is it? What is it? Whatcha doin? <tweet, tweet> Hey buddy, c’mere. <tweet, tweet> I’m a starling. Hey buddy. What is it? What is it?”

:swear: :boggle: :laughing:

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BTW somebody pointed out to me that these look awfully similar…

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Hmm…if he’ll eat meal worm moths, he’s welcome to come stay with Auntie Redwolf for a spell. I must have gotten some buggy grain from the natural foods store a while back…even though I’ve tossed out all the suspects, we’re still overrun with mealies!

Redwolf

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Those are the devil to get rid of. Tossing the infested grain is just the beginning. The larvae don’t necessarily pupate in the grain . . . they climb out and go find a protected spot in which to spin a little tent. They mature and fly off, mate, then lay eggs near more grain, into which the newly hatched larvae will go. If there is a wrapper on it, they’ll just chew a hole through.

You CAN get rid of them, though. I once had some assistance from a kindly gecko, but on other occasions managed it all by myself.

In addition to tossing all the obviously infested grain, carefully examine all other grain products to see if the plastic or waxed paper inside wrappers have pinpoint holes. Examine the lower edges carefully. If they were supposed to be sealed, but now leak air, they do. Examine the inside of the box for larvae. Open all – ALL of them, even if it’s not a grain product – box flaps to check for larvae pupating there. Anything with webby shreds on the packaging, but no obvious larvae, needs to be cooked and used or frozen. Anything with an ominous powdery residue at the bottom will still have or had larvae in it–the powder is poo.

Completely empty the cabinets and remove the shelves. Toss the shelfpaper. Look for larvae in the edges, seams, and crevices. Wash every surface with detergent in water. If you have a lot of crevices in your cabinets, especially if they’re so deep you can’t see what’s in them, consider sealing them with a new coat of paint.

Examine the edges of cans and bottles, wiping them off with a wet sponge to which a bit of detergent has been added. Check carefully under labels and around caps. Turn over jars and examine the underside of cap edges.

Don’t miss the edges on the kitchen counter, the underside of appliances (yup, the toaster!), tables and chairs, the silverware drawer, and curtains.

Every time you see a moth flit by, waste no effort in exterminating it. It’s sole purpose in life is to lay eggs, and that’s what it’s looking for when you see it.

It’s a bit of work, but you can rid yourself of them–without having to resort to insecticide, too.