Today I saw a pic of a baby cowbird next 2 its nest “parent” and it was so much bigger!!!!! Which is the sort of thing that gets normal people upset about the injustice of nest parasitism but makes *me* worry if baby cowbirds get bird dysmorphia
This (from Cornell Labs via Merlin) is the pic I was looking at. It’s just a little baby but it’s so much bigger than its “parent”!!!! Do baby cowbirds feel isolated? Do they understand they’re a different bird, or are they just a really bad sparrow?
hey, good news! ecologists have been studying this very thing! it seems young cowbirds have some kind of innate sense that leads them to sneak out of their foster nest at night to hang out in grasslands where they—more often than not—meet other cowbirds and learn more about what they really are.
Gamers this has been on my mind for a while, and I’ve been Going Through It so I can’t thoughtfully articulate it yet but: the little things can, and absolutely will, save you.
It’s noticing the bunny in the yard eating dandelions one by one. It’s buying lemonade from eager kids at a stand using change scrounged from the center console of your car. It’s enjoying the smell of hot pavement steaming after a brief summer rain. It’s taking a breath that feels fuller and more satisfying than usual.
It’s painstakingly training your brain to notice the small but rampant string of good things woven through every single day. It’s that same kind of training that you have to do in order to undo the years of anxious patterns that have been ruthlessly hammered into the soft pathways of your mind.
I don’t know how to connect the two dots, but the connection is there. I know it’s there because something as silly as the satisfying crunch of a knife cutting a crisp grilled cheese sandwich in half has meant the difference between hanging on and panicking during a stressful day.
I can’t explain how the many small things I did and asked for and noticed over YEARS finally coalesced into something solid and real and steadying but they did. I’m not saying that petting the one patch of fur between your pets ears that’s a little softer than any other spot is going to cure your depression tomorrow.
But I’m suggesting that when you stitch it together with a thousand other things from a thousand other days, it might just rescue you from the one day in your future that would have destroyed you otherwise.
