Eighth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

It's one thing if mankind is hunted to extinction by ChatGPT, but I really do object to being executed by Bing.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3169743#cmt3169743 )

Welcome back! Fandom chat, misc creativity, internet weirdness, books, films, anything! Tell meme about it so we can get to the next post title!

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Comments

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

The author initially fingered a fight with another caracara as the culprit, but some of the details didn't add up - the victim died from a broken neck, but it didn't look like he'd been in a scuffle. The crime was too clean.

A few months later, researchers spotted a lost chimango - a smaller mainland relative of the striated caracaras on the islands - hanging around some of the flocks of teenage caracaras, trying to find a good opportunity to snatch a bite. He briefly considers the convenient possibility that the chimango might've been the culprit, but rules it out too - chimangos are smart but much smaller, and while they can take out larger prey, they usually target the weak or the injured. G7 was spotted hours before his unfortunate demise, looking just fine.

Besides, chimangos are scavengers, and while something had taken a bite out of the victim's corpse, it had been very careful to only pick out the pectoral muscles. Not really the modus operandi of a bird that had been scraping the last bits of meat off an abandoned carcass. But thinking about this reminded our amateur investigator of a throwaway line he'd read in one of William Henry Hudson's books, where that exact pattern was mentioned as a curious habit of the peregrine falcon.

You can almost hear the pieces clicking into place. Unlike the caracara, which are very much generalists - a strange mishmash of falcon biology and crow behaviors - peregrine falcons have evolved specifically for this kind of kill. They dive-bomb their prey, stunning them so they can't put up a fight, and then use their specially-shaped beaks to snap their spinal cords. It's not common for a peregrine to go after a striated caracara, but they're opportunists and an inexperienced juvenile might've slipped up just enough to be an easy mark.

We'll never know for sure, but it's conclusive enough for this episode of Last Birdcast on the Left.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

I forgot my last line! I was going to end it with 'Bird Bothering Bob is absolved... For now.'