{"id":56,"date":"2003-12-13T00:05:13","date_gmt":"2003-12-13T07:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/?p=55"},"modified":"2003-12-13T00:05:13","modified_gmt":"2003-12-13T07:05:13","slug":"staring-contest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/?p=56","title":{"rendered":"Staring contest"},"content":{"rendered":"

I came face to face with a red-tailed hawk<\/a> yesterday, that had just killed one of my chickens and had inadvertantly snagged itself in the net fence surrounding the coop. A magnificent bird, it gave me the most piercing stare as I struggled to free it from its entanglement, *carefully* avoiding its rapier-like talons and snapping, razor sharp beak. That purposeful and unflinching pair of eyes momentarily connected me with a much older and deeper level of cognition, that of “bird mind”. Birds of course are what the dinosaurs evolved into<\/a>, and yet they are capable of astonishing feets of cognition<\/a>, governed by a neural chassis utterly alien to our own.
\nJames Blish<\/a> imagined what a world would be like if bird cognition evolved into a planet’s dominant culture, in his (1972) Midsummer Century<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The next day they saw three more of the sparrow-like birds, and the next day, five. And the morning after that, they emerged from their sleeping burrow to find a smoke-black thing like an enormous crow looking down upon them, just out of club’s reach, its head bent, its neck extended until it seemed almost snakelike; its eyes glassy and unblinking. . . . For very disparate reasons, neither of the two minds was surprised when the bird’s beak parted, its throat ruffled and pulsed, and it said in a voice like fingernails on a blackboard:
\n“GO HOME.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Upon being released, the red-tailed hawk flapped lazily up to the nearest tree and continued to stare down hungrily at the panic-stricken flock of silkies<\/a>, not having been distracted in the least from its original mission. Oh to have even a *fraction* of the focus of a red-tailed hawk. Of course they don’t get distracted by blogging . . .
\nThe fat little chicken that the hawk was after, was indeed an attractive target. Bred and morphed by our species for millenia, chickens are the ultimate symbiots<\/a>, originally sharing the tropical forest edge habitats we lived in, when they were first domesticated <\/a> over 8,000 years ago, in southeast Asia. Ever since, chickens have provided us with eggs, meat, fertilizer, wake up service and garbage disposal, in return for our protection and a few handfuls of grain. This arrangement has proven to be pretty good for humans, although not always for individual chickens, especially if they wind up in cock-fights or factory farms. Still, properly looked after, chickens are supremely useful, portable and fun and keeping them makes you feel, well *self-sufficient* You don’t have to kill them to benefit because they lay EGGS. Chickens are a particularly useful creature in urban contexts, literally providing the *means of production<\/a>* to turn garbage into protein, though keeping them is frowned upon by many municipalities.
\nWhen I was living in New York’s Lower East Side, I was elated to come across some fellow hardcore poultry zealots, in the form of these Puerto Rican men, with whom I could talk a little chicken. I loved hearing the crowing of roosters over the din of the Manhattan traffic, knowing that the chicken men were in their own small way, committing an act of revolution. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Loisida Chicken men<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I came face to face with a red-tailed hawk yesterday, that had just killed one of my chickens and had inadvertantly snagged itself in the net fence surrounding the coop. A magnificent bird, it gave me the most piercing stare as I struggled to free it from its entanglement, *carefully* avoiding its rapier-like talons and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}