This one isn’t so much odd as appropriate, sparked by finding a comic gallery on Bored Panda the other day. On occasion, they feature a collection of webcomics from a single artist, and this time around it was Rosemary Mosco. I recognized the style quickly, because I’d been going to her site Bird and Moon for a while now – she’s a naturalist and educator and her comics present both useful information and wry humor. The one that sparked this post, however, was this one (used with permission) which I hadn’t seen before:
It’s all relative, isn’t it? For instance, herons wouldn’t give the faintest shit about diamond rings (and neither should we, really,) but crows might like them. Some species of penguins also like rocks, but probably not diamonds – they’re impressed with the most round and perfect pebbles presented by suitors.
Now comes the odd memory part. Many years back I was firing off dozens of frames of the activities at Venice Audubon Society Rookery in Venice, Florida, one of the best birding spots in the world – this is not simply my opinion, since I haven’t been to enough to judge, but a broad consensus. Plainly visible in one tree was a great blue heron nest, a completed one since the female appeared to be actively sitting on eggs. Across the pond comes another heron, clasping in his beak a fairly large branch, and he alighted on the nest proudly with this new offering, even though the nest seemed perfectly complete and already in use. He proudly (so I’m assuming) attempted to place this in an ideal position in the nest walls, to be countermanded by a loud croak from the female. Chastened, he chose a different placement, with the same response. This went on for perhaps 15 seconds, a rather public argument accompanied by a bit of wing flapping, until the male resolutely took up the branch again and flew off, dropping it into the pond with a resigned air and continuing onward. The magic was gone.
[It’s easy to assign human emotions to other species, and most likely to be totally incorrect, though I think the altercation at least was hard to misinterpret: the branch was unwanted, for whatever reason – it might even have been because the male was supposed to be bringing back food. Of course, herons are one of the more harsh and noisy birds when they choose to be, and immediately before I started typing this, one chose to be right at the edge of the main pond, plainly audible through the open door to Walkabout Studios here. The Girlfriend’s Sprog could attest to this too, when she and her fiancé camped overnight on the edge of a lake and were awakened several times by herons loudly voicing their protests.]
I want you to note something subtle in the above comic, too: by the third panel, the feathers on top of the female’s head begin to rise, as well as her beak opening. It’s one thing to communicate emotions with trivial additions or changes to the drawing of humans, and quite another to do it with birds.
Thanks to Rosemary Mosco for permission to use this comic, and h/t to Bored Panda