The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Killdeer escape?

 

I had been trusted with the task of feeding the killdeer  chicks at the wildlife center. I put trays of food in the shorebird pen. Elaborate trays of shorebird dainties: freshly-thawed tiny invertebrates, insects, duckweed. I was careful to make sure no killdeer got out. It didn't seem hard, since the appalling sight of a human made them run, crouch, and freeze.  

 

But as I was walking back toward the main building, I heard a killdeer overhead. Nowhere near the shorebird pen. Now I was the one who froze.

 

Did I let one out? Oh no, did I forget to latch the door? Did they all get out? Oh no no no.

 

...sounds more like an adult killdeer – it's loud. And close.

 

Oh. 

 

*#^&+$%.

 

A mockingbird was atop a high pole, running through his imitations. Starting with some killdeer calls.

Giving me a pang of guilty fear. As if I need any more of those.

 

If he'd noticed, I'm sure he would have thought it was funny. He would do it again. Which is why it's important to stay stone-faced around mockers. Which you probably know. Because you went to grade school too.

Stowaway bird

Red-tailed tropicbirds are aces of tropical Pacific skies. They're big white birds with striking black eye markings. Each has two ridiculously long red tail feathers in the midst of its normal white tail feathers (thus Phaethon rubricauda). They catch fish by plunging into the sea from a height and grabbing them. Also squid.

The tropicbird is one of those seabirds that usually doesn't bother with land. They fly or rest on the water. But that doesn't work when a bird is in that awkward egg stage, so they breed on islands. They like to nest colonially, let's say on a nice coral atoll, tucked under a bush, or in a niche between hunks of coral.

Sometimes, apparently, a bird looking for a nice flat atoll lands on the nice flat deck of a ship, and tucks itself into a niche between cargo containers, and sits there peaceably waiting for the rest of the gang to show up, unfussed that the island it has selected is moving, like Spidermonkey Island in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle.

Recently a tropicbird was found sitting zazen on a Korean cargo ship. When the ship arrived in southern California, the bird was brought to International Bird Rescue's San Pedro center, where she was found to be in good health. On a recent visit, I saw her there, resting on a mesh haul-out in a small private pool. She looked at us cheerfully. It seems that tropicbirds are among the island birds that have no fear of land animals such as humans.

Her pool was too small for plunge-feeding. IBR's blog has video of the tropicbird being fed fish. “Ah, they are grabbing my head. Yes, they are prying open my bill and inserting a fish. Ooh, there's a fish in my bill. Sweet.” The tropicbird swallows, sometimes with a little throat massage to urge the fish along, and sits placidly. It does not occur to her to reach a few inches forward and take another fish. That's not how she rolls.

Tropicbirds are aerialists but not distance fliers, so after tests came up negative for contagious diseases, and USFWS permission was received, the bird was put on a plane to Hawaii and then on another to Midway Island. There they put her in the water and off she flew.

Red-tailed tropicbirds breed on Midway, so with any luck she'll find a mate, and a nest site that doesn't shift coordinates, and will not depend on the kindness of Korean sailors, bird rescuers, and government agencies. Island tameness can be a disastrous feature for wild animals, but in this bird's case it worked out nicely.

We love our stinky kids

The story about the smelly babies isn't true. Birds don't reject their nestlings if people have handled them and gotten human scent all over them. Most birds can't smell much, anyway. (But don't say this around a vulture. Or a kiwi. Or a fulmar.)

 I don't know how this story got started, but I certainly heard it  when I was a kid. Somehow it had an appalling plausibility –  our very touch turns innocent babies to pariahs.

(Not the actual baby robins I'm talking about.)

Fortunately for three small birds I met recently, it's nonsense. These robin nestlings fell out of their nest on a windy morning. They hit the sidewalk uninjured, and a kind passer-by picked them up (intelligently noting the address) and took them to the nearest animal shelter. The shelter had the expertise, and the feeding formula, to take care of the young birds. But they knew the best upbringing for robins comes from robins. They had eight million things to do besides feeding screaming baby robins every 20 minutes. A wildlife rescue organization would try to get the robins back to their parents.

 I'd been told that the best thing to do for uninjured baby birds is to get them back up in their nest, or near their nest, or at least up in the branches of their tree out of cat-reach, and let their parents take care of them. I believed it. But I had never done it. (What if it were as false as the human-stink story?)

We inspected the site. With the address, we could identify the home tree, but it was leafy and no nest could be seen. Besides, that nest was clearly a slipshod dealio that baby robins fell out of in a high wind, a flimsy sieve, a deathtrap. We'd have to rig up a substitute. The worrying part was that there didn't seem to be any robins there. The parents were supposed to be hanging around calling for their children. But no. No one was around but blackbirds. By this time the babies had been away most of the day. Had the parents given up? 

 We thought we'd try anyway, so we went to get the chicks. They were past the naked blob stage, into the partially-feathered lump stage. They were starting to have robin faces. Maybe a week from fledging, they were correctly-behaved bird children. They alternated between gaping and screeching, twittering softly, and squatting silent and motionless like little lumps of ugly. The shelter gave them a feeding, which would last them in case their parents never returned and we had to bring them back.

Back at the tree, we scanned for robins. Nothing. Using a ladder, we wired a plastic tub into the branches, making sure it wouldn't tip in the wind like certain shoddy constructions. We'd made drainage holes so liquid couldn't collect in it. That was the nest. The shelter staff had made a nice lining with pine needles and bits of a feather duster. While the wiring took place, the nestlings hunkered low inside, pretending not to exist.  

 We took the ladder away and looked around. No robins. We peered around with binoculars. Nothing but blackbirds. We crossed the street and sat on a bench and looked. No robins. So we got in the car and drove away, but then came back, and parked across the street, taking advantage of robins' inability to read license plates or tell a Delorean from a Hupmobile. We stayed in the car. Blackbirds flew over the tree, perched on a wire above the tree, and squeaked at other blackbirds, but there were no robins.  

 Until suddenly there was a silent robin in the tree next to the nest tree. With something in its bill. It silently dived into the nest tree. It had been 16 minutes since we walked away from the tree.

To be sure it was true, we walked down the other side of the street, crossed, and casually walked under the tree, glancing up for just a second as we did. An adult robin was perched – silently – two feet from the nest tub.

 It makes sense that parent birds would approach the nest without making giveaway sounds, but I'm still amazed that they so quickly detected that their kids were back (in a nearby location, with a new pre-fab house) and resumed food deliveries.

 Mostly, I'm delighted that they overlooked the fact that the kids must have reeked of rescuer stink.

 

Follow-up:

I went by the nest tree about two weeks after we put it up. Since the young robins had been about a week from fledging, I wasn't worried about disturbing things. Everything was the same. The nest was still up there, if you looked, and no robins were in sight. I was relieved that the plastic nest hadn't been distubed.

Going back later to remove the nest, I saw that the tree had been heavily pruned since the last visit. It was no longer a thickly-leaved place where you could hide a nest. Whoever had pruned the tree had carefully left the plastic nest. It was a touching gesture, although the nest was now too exposed to be safe. I was very glad that the pruning had happened after the babies had fledged. I took the nest down and examined the lining. It appeared well used.

Babies are often brought into rescue centers when trees being pruned or felled turn out to have nests -- baby birds, squirrel pups, dragonets.* It's better to prune out of nesting season.

Early this morning, I went back to look for young robins, and saw this squirt in the little park across the street. The spots on the feathers show that this bird fledged this year and hasn't gone through the preformative molt yet -- that it's just a child.

It could be some other robins' child, but it's the right age and the right place to be one of the three rescued fledglings.

 

(*Okay, probably not dragonets.)

 

Tiny tar pits for the home

Glue traps are nasty. Animals caught in them die slow horrible deaths. Some people don't mind that for the mice and rats they intend to trap, but are upset when some other creature falls victim.

 At a wildlife rescue center, someone recently brought in a glue trap with a mockingbird hopelessly plastered to it. The bird had been bounding along on mockingbird business when it hopped onto the trap and got its feet stuck. It struggled to get free, striking down with its wings, getting its wings trapped, hitting the trap with its bill, getting its bill stuck, and so forth until it couldn't move at all. It was immobile, terrified.

The person who set the trap found it while the bird was still alive, and rushed it to the rescue centre, swearing they'd never put a glue trap out again.

 What you do in such a case may or may not start with cutting away with the base of the trap. You may sprinkle open areas of glue with sand or some kind of powder, so if you free part of the bird it won't instantly get stuck again, and so your hand or glove won't get stuck. Then you apply an oil like canola oil, to dilute and loosen the intensely sticky “glue.” (Some people use powder for this step too.)

 Now the bird isn't gluey, but it's seriously oily. Still terrified but maybe also starting to feel peeved. It wants to leave.

 Then you have to wash the oil off the angry bird. (Warm water with 1-2% dishwashing liquid.)

 Then you have to rinse the soapy water off the furious bird.

 Then you have to dry the enraged bird, probably with a heat lamp.

 The process is so traumatic that you don't do it all at once, since the bird probably wouldn't survive the shock and horror. It may also have torn feathers out when struggling in the glue.

After the mockingbird had been through all this, was unglued, clean and dry, it had a day or two in a warm dim quiet place (with food and water) so its condition could stabilize, and was transferred to another wildlife rescue center with better facilities for small perching birds.  

When the bird had recovered from its ordeal and had preened its plumage back into passable condition, it was set free.

 

I looked on YouTube for videos showing animals being freed from glue traps and cleaned. There weren't many, and the best one was too long to put here. (It's an eastern phoebe. Rather than saying the classic “phoe-be!” or even giving an alarm call, it's clacking its bill in a threatening way. 'I'm clean enough! Stand back! Okay, now I'm mad! Watch out!')

 The video search was depressing. It showed that many people think animals getting caught in glue traps is hilarious, and some people think that other people getting stuck in glue traps is incredibly sexy.

 On the other hand, I did find these excellent video clips suggesting that being stuck in glue is funny when it happens to a perpetually unsuccessful yet irrepressible coyote. Who was the one who put the glue there in the first place. (Think about that, setters of glue traps.)

 

 

 

What shall I do with this prehensile tail?

I had heard that the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans was a really great zoo. The people who told me this (not zoo aficionados) were never able to say what was great about it. They didn't mention rare species, successful breeding programs, or brilliant enrichment schemes.

It was just really great.

I recently got to go for the first time, and I think I know the reason for their enthusiasm.

Frozen daiquiris.

They sell these along with the usual fast food available at American zoos. I asked the server what was in them, thinking maybe it was some sort of lime soda. She found the question strange. “Rum?” she said.

I shouldn't have been surprised. New Orleans is the wettest town I know, one that could have a banner at the airport reading WELCOME SLOPPY DRUNKS. It just hadn't occurred to me that this spirit extended to the zoo.

Shocked, I purchased a daiquiri and set out to see some animals.

I am interested in zoos. I loved the giant anteaters, who were milling around madly, awaiting their chance to go back into their night quarters.
 

The humans were like zoo visitors everywhere, inclined to stand next to a large sign that explains that orangutans are not monkeys but apes and say “Look at the monkey, Jesse!” Yet they were less frenetic than usual, maybe because of the heat. In the languid humid air, people swanned dreamily along the paths. Some were clasping icy beverages. Perhaps the slow aimless pace of the visitors is less jangling to the animals.

While walking around the pond in the South American Pampas exhibit, I heard a splash. I turned to see a rhea hastily climbing out of the water. The other rheas seemed  fascinated and started following the damp one. (What was it like? Was it fun? Was it cool? Did you float? Are you gonna go in again? Go in again! You should go in  again!)



Was the rhea imitating the ducks in the pond? No. Later investigation revealed that rheas are known to swim. Darwin saw rheas swim across the Santa Cruz River in Argentina. So this zoo-born rhea was experimenting with a skill used by its wild relatives. That was interesting.

Finally I arrived at the spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi). 
The large exhibit, modeled on Central American ruins, was good to look at and, more importantly, full of things  a monkey can do with a prehensile tail.

If you had such a tail, you could hook it over something.  Or twine it along something.
   

You could use it for balance, like an outrigger,  or for artistic emphasis.


You could use it to carry things, even if all you have to tote is a bunch of grass.

  In a vision I now imagine the Audubon zoo extending its hospitality to its occupants. I behold anteaters even more avid to get into their evening quarters, where frosty beverages are served. I suppose that an individual with a prehensile tail is perfectly fitted to stroll a slack rope while holding a daiquiri. Dreamily, I even wonder if this policy hasn't already been implemented. Unscheduled swimming is the sort of thing alcohol often inspires in young creatures.

What a great zoo.

Beak outlook

In Fort Jackson, Louisiana, the little bird having the oil washed off was struggling passionately. I couldn't figure out what it was. Not a gull, not a tern – could it be a rail? No, surely not. I was told it was a black skimmer.

 
But I've seen skimmers (Rynchops niger). They don't look like that. I was told it was a young one. Skimmers don't hatch with those bizarre long bills with the lower mandible longer than the upper. (How would that fit in an egg?)

Then I remembered other bird species in which little snub bills of the chicks give hardly any clue to the crazy big bills they'll have as adults.

Chicks' bills have to fit in the egg, and they have to be used to get out of the egg. After they hatch, there's time for bills to elongate or bulk up, to curve down or up, or to acquire interesting attachments if necessary.

The clean little skimmer was moved to the rinse table, where it continued to resist. You rinse my wing, I'll stamp on your hand! Stop or I'll I bite you! There, I bit you! I might do it again! Finally they wrapped the defiant creature in a towel and hustled it off to the drying room. (Many birds never seem to think of stabbing people in the eye with their bills. Instead they bite. You don't want to be bitten by an eagle or a swan, but when an egret bites you, it's okay. They don't have the leverage.)

I went looking for video of birds in which the chicks have to go through some serious bill growth to catch up to their parents. I found these spoonbills (Platalea ajaja) at Animal Kingdom in Orlando.

Also this shoebill (Balaeniceps rex) family at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa. The chick doesn't have the big bill yet, but it has the slow serious demeanor you need to carry off a giant smiley proboscis.

There's an unsettling video from a camera inside a trumpeter hornbill (Bycanistes bucinator) nest. Trumpeter hornbills, like some other hornbills, have a system in which the married female seals herself into a nest cavity with an adobe of her own devising (mud, fruit pulp, and bird dung, if you want the recipe). She leaves just a small opening through which food can be passed.

Once immured, she lays eggs. In fact, as long as she's in there, and not flying around, she molts her feathers. Her devoted spouse may help her build the wall. The advantage is thought to be that this keeps their eggs, and then chicks, safe from predators, and perhaps from other hornbills.

Time passes, the eggs hatch into revolting little hornbills, and the male feeds them all. When it gets simply too crowded in the nest cavity, the mother breaks herself out.

In this video of captive breeding, the hornbill cam shows not-dressed-for-company mother and repulsive not-dressed-at-all child in the nest. At the far end is the opening, and there is much excitement and whining as the devoted father starts passing snacks in to his wife, who feeds them to their horrifying child. Who looks even more disgusting with banana oozing out of the corner of its bill – but notice what a normal-looking bill it is.

Some birds go with a cuter look.
Even if you think they're adorable, though, it's more polite not to stare and talk about whether chicks have their parent's nose. You might embarrass them. They might get all shy.

Oh, here's what a grown-up skimmer's bill is good for. For this to work out, the water should be clean.

Ugh, paparazzi

Sometimes you see a barn and you know it has owls. 

This one is airy, with many escape  routes. As we walked to the door, a barn owl (Tyto alba) silently flew out.

A helpful person had put up an owl box. Owls had accepted it. Not recently, judging by the size of the charnel scatter of debris below, full of fragile white bones of rodents.

An owlet looked out. I think it was worried, maybe horrified. But it wasn't too frightened to stare.

Not all barns are suitable for owl nesting. When a barn is otherwise good but has no owl box, owls may nest on a corner between rafters.

This old barn is so great that I think it would have an owl nest even without the box. It's made of solid beams and planks, strongly joined.

Before there were barns, these owls nested in natural places like holes in trees. Humans have reduced the number of trees (and many humans object to trees with holes in them, with the notion that such trees are diseased, unsound, and liable to drop heavy limbs onto humans including small beloved children running through the park to raise awareness for kidney disease).
 

However, we have put up barns which can be nested in. Barns attract rodents, useful to barn owls, since an owl family may eat more than a thousand in a year.

Barn owls evolved hunting in meadows and along forest edges and nesting in trees. Some still do so, but others hunt on agricultural land and nest in agricultural buildings. We're not completely useless to owls.
  

Even if we give them the creeps. 

About a primate

A certain member of the minor Scottish nobility has accused me of being “a bird person.”

I deny it. Just as I refuse to choose between being “a cat person” or “a dog person,” I refuse to limit my interest in animals to, say, Class Aves (birds), Class Mammalia, or Class Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes).

I do mention birds more often than, say, primates. But that's because my circumstances are so sadly limited that I wake to bird song, not chimpanzee pant-hooting. The creature atop the nearest power pole may be a raven or a starling (or twice, a merlin), but so far hasn't been a colobus. And when something hurtles across my path it might be a squirrel or a lizard, but it is more likely to be a bird. Never a gibbon. Damn it.

I gladly mention apes and monkeys when I have an excuse.

Right here I have a passage from Ludwig Koch-Isenburg's 1963 work, Through the Jungle Very Softly, about Koko, a white-handed gibbon (Hylobates lar) he raised in his Frankfurt home. Koch-Isenburg had tons of exotic pets, toward whom Koko took a lordly attitude. Koko liked to release the African skink from the terrarium, but would drag it out if it tried to sneak under a cupboard.

One of Koko's favorite companions was a male golden pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus). Koko found the pheasant fascinating and often  grabbed its tail and dragged it along with him. The pheasant, reluctant to quarrel with his childhood playmate, permitted this, “and resisted only feebly when Koko tried to carry him up a tree.”
 
The pheasant “would scurry away..., but Koko would catch up with him and clutch him by the tail,” Koch-Isenburg writes.


The pheasant tried to be nice. One day Koko went too far and the pheasant gouged him with the spurs on its legs. Koko screamed in outrage, but never bullied the bird again.

It can be difficult, even painful, when the interests of childhood friends diverge. One individual is increasingly involved in active sports like swinging through branches, while the other enjoys finding food items scattered on the ground and meeting like-minded ladies. I think we've all seen this happen. That doesn't mean it hurts any less.

I was hoping this effort might avert the “bird person” accusation, but now I'm afraid I've failed. I try to write about a primate, and the primate himself drags in a bird. Och, what's the use? 

Big-nosed heroes

On remote islands where they breed, some small seabirds come and go at night. Thus they evade big daytime killers like skuas and gulls. Their secret nests are in burrows or under rocks.

Leach's Storm-petrel (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) is one of these furtive little birds. They are smaller than robins, though with longer wings. It's said they don't even venture out if the moonlight is too bright.

Visiting Gull Island in Newfoundland, Franklin Russell, author of a moody 1965 book The Secret Islands: An Exploration ran across a petrel in trouble.

She had gotten snared in tangled grass as she sneaked out before dawn with the other petrels. Russell picked her up. She screamed. He untangled her and tried to get her to go back down any burrow, but she darted away. She flew at top speed, away from the island – and instantly 50-odd gulls were after her with intent to catch and eat. These would have been big Herring Gulls or Black-backed Gulls.


“The petrel was so well ringed by her enemies that to escape she would have had to run among at least ten gulls in any direction she tried to break out. This seemed impossible; but the petrel was not concerned with possibility or reason. Never for a moment was there any relaxation of the thrust and parry of the hunt. All the creatures were absorbed,” writes Russell.

The chase hurtled through the air above a raft of thousands of puffins floating on the sea. Suddenly the puffins rose off the water. “...something alarmed them. Perhaps it was the intensity of the gull attacks; perhaps the petrel screamed her anguish.” Russell saw the petrel veer toward the cloud of flying puffins and vanish into their midst.

Huh? The gulls hung around where the puffin had been before giving up.

Russell writes that he watched the departing flock of puffins with binoculars and “saw, finally, a tiny shape twist away from their mass.”

A happy ending for the petrel. Russell says puffins (Fratercula arctica) aren't afraid of gulls. Puffins go to and from their nest burrows in daylight. But gulls are serious predators on puffins, though not when the puffins are going around in crowds thousands strong.

Probably the puffins weren't deliberately rescuing the petrel. Probably some of the puffins were freaked out by the gulls pursuing the frantic out-of-place petrel, and decided to leave and go some place less creepy, right now. The other thousands of puffins didn't intend to be left behind if something was wrong, so they all took off, forming a screen into which the petrel shook her pursuers. Good deal.

Cool hammer. Too bad I'm not a nail.

A 2008 New Yorker story by Margaret Talbot on Irene Pepperberg's work with parrots and language made brief mention of unsuccessful work with mynahs and language. This was to explain why Pepperberg didn't train her eloquent parrot Alex with classic behaviorist methods of operant conditioning. I recognized the reference.

While reading about animal communication for Becoming A Tiger I ran across a long article called “Verbal Behavior and the Mynah Bird.” (1967.) Experimental psychologists Joseph Grosslight and Wesley Zaynor had a theory that babies talk earlier if you pick them up when they cry. They speculated that by thus rewarding babies, you create a “noisy organism.” The noisy baby learns to attach meaning to noises later – but sooner than a quiet baby.

They couldn't experiment with babies. They went with talking birds. Mynahs – great choice! (Gracula species.) Easy to buy (then), easy to feed, can't bite your finger off, cheap. Definitely noisy organisms. They started the Mynah Bird Project. They scheduled a report called “Verbal Behavior and the Mynah Bird and Implications for Man.”

The paper makes it clear that they understood that babies eventually learn language and mynahs don't. They say it several ways so no one thinks they're stupid or anthropomorphic. My favorite way they say it: “there is a complete absence of zoosemiotic considerations.” We get it, guys. You're not zoosemiotes.

(Zoosemiotics seems to be the study of signs or symbols in animal communication. You know, meaning. Can't have that.)

In the 1960s operant conditioning was new. It seemed as if, using this powerful system of rewards and punishments – you could get any animal to do anything. You could teach a rat to push a lever, a pigeon to peck when it saw the word “PECK,” a chicken to dance. (Okay, teach a chicken to “dance.” These are academics. It's a chicken. How well did you expect it to dance?)

Grosslight and Zaynor would use operant conditioning to create a bird equivalent of noisy babies. They viewed a mynah saying “Hello!” as “motor behavior not wholly unlike the classical operant bar-press of the rat in a Skinner box.” But, they reported in the plaintive 1967, “Verbal Behavior and the Mynah Bird,” that they had taken “and Implications for Man” out of the title due to “adversity.”

What adversity? Uncooperative mynahs. The researchers expected great results by putting each mynah in a sound-proof chamber and playing a recorded phrase which the bird would get food rewards for repeating. Isolation in sound-proof chamber = no chance of hearing other noises. Recording = identical stimulus each time. Rewards for repeating = according to operant conditioning principles, rewarding behavior increases the frequency of the behavior. Voila! Superior talking birds!

But instead of repeating the phrase, the mynah would stay mute, beak shut. Finally the researchers would give up and put the bird back in the aviary – and then the mynah would say it. Or the bird in the chamber would say the phrase once and never again.

The researchers were also bewildered by the daily “jungle hour,” when mynahs vocalized without food rewards. They screeched, cackled, hooted, whistled, clicked, and hollered—why?

Their failure to produce talkers led Grosslight and Zaynor to confess “we do not know the motivational or controlling stimuli for the emission of vocal or verbal behavior in the mynah.” They could not answer the question, “why does the mynah bother to talk at all?” (Some scientists complain researchers don't publish negative results often enough. Maybe they're afraid people like me would mock them. At least I didn't call them zoosemiotes.)

This doesn't mean operant conditioning doesn't work. It means the researchers didn't understand  mynahs. It didn't occur to them that being trapped in a soundproof chamber hearing repetitive tapes is already punishment for a mynah. They assumed that food is the only reward an animal cares for.

Nowhere do Grosslight and Zaynor say a harsh word about mynahs. They never blame the birds for the failure of their experimental vision. Which would be easy, because mynahs can be jerks.

I knew a pet store mynah who spoke dozens of phrases, which were scrawled on a card on the front of his cage. New customers would try the top few phrases on the card. “Hi there!” they would read, “I’m a  pretty bird!” The mynah would put its head on one side and stare out of one eye. “Hello! I’m a pretty bird! How are you?” the visitors would try. The mynah would stare out of the other eye. “Hello! Pretty bird! What’s your name?”

Silence.

As they turned away, the mynah would sneer, “You're stupid!”

He rolled the r – 'Yerrrrrr stupid!”-- in a way that suggested he had once lived around a ten-year-old boy.

So one of Grosslight and Zaynor's few successes makes sense. With food rewards they could increase the frequency with which the mynah Charlie said “I talk!” They could decrease the frequency with which Charlie said, “Ah shut up!” But they could not decrease it to zero.

It's enough to make you zoosemiotic.