Tuesday 13 June 2017

redundancy in parrots


In my current office is this book, which is not written by Juniper Parr (a character name I intend to use) but by Juniper and Parr.

What can you learn from a book of parrots? Quite a lot of things, but the big first message I took, with due respect to the environmentalists, is that there seems to be a lot of redundancy in parrots. Look at the Amazon ones. Really, these are all different species? And the parrots are as sure about this as we are? I mean, a lot of these guys seem more from the same species as each other than I seem to be from the same species as Lady Gaga, Ryan Gosling and Rafa Nadal. It's only in plate eight where they even seem to be trying.

(Maybe I should look at it for more than five minutes next time. I bet some of the species are disputed. Wikipedia seems to think the yellow headed ones are three different species. Just what constitutes a species is sketchy in general, which is a constantly riveting biological fact.)