Photography Blog | South | Africa

Corrigan, as a baby, loved to be scratched.

By Ctein

Xmas reveals two unexpected characteristics of the parrots of Chez Ctein.

The first is that they don't care a fig about the Xmas tree. That's been consistent behavior amongst all the psittacines we've owned—three conures of varying types and sizes, one African Gray (the famous and previously-fabled Elmo), and too many budgies to count. All of them, to a bird, have totally ignored this bizarre artifact that appears in their midst. They're not frightened by it, they're not attracted by it, it's like it doesn't exist.

This is exceedingly abnormal bird behavior. Describing birds as "high-strung" is understatement. Their little nervous systems are stretched C-above-high-C taut; they are ever on the lookout for anomalies that could indicate danger (or opportunity). A sudden unexpected noise, a motion caught out of the corner of their eye, something in our hands when we approach the cages that they don't expect to see, even a piece of paper, any of these things can cause a panic reaction. There are old parrots and there are bold parrots; there are few old, bold parrots.

This is true even of Elmo, who has to be the most mellow, chilled-out African Gray I've ever known. It's most assuredly true of Corrigan, our yellow-side green cheek conure, who Paula and I are firmly convinced freaks out at dust motes. Screeches and alarm calls issue from him aperiodically for no reason that we can discern. Whatever danger he's frequently alerting us to is invisible to us.

Objects above birds have major threat potential. A strange object at ground level may be a prowling or slithering predator, but a strange object overhead is assuredly bad news.

So, come Xmas Eve, there are Paula and I hauling the Xmas tree into the living room, carrying it high over our heads so it won't bump into furniture or objets d'art, abruptly setting it upright barely a foot or so from Corrigan's cage (and only a few feet from the other cages), where it towers to the ceiling, and covering it with bright and shiny objects.

A typical Ctein household Xmas tree, with Corrigan's cage to the upper right. Elmo's is on the left. Why the birds should find it totally ignorable is beyond me.

There's no reaction from the birds whatsoever. They act as if it isn't even there. Elmo may be accustomed to Xmas trees, as we don't know the habits of his previous owner. The other birds have never seen one before. They are not repulsed by it, nor are they attracted to it once it's decorated. It is covered with all sorts of shinies, which are normally like catnip to a parrot—but it doesn't exist. Apparently an Xmas tree is too utterly alien for their avian brains to even register. It's the strangest thing.

Yum, bones
The second surprise is that Elmo is a serious opportunistic omnivore, with distinct carnivorous tendencies. Most parrots are opportunistic omnivores. It is generally thought that their carnivorous inclinations lean towards bugs and grubs and maybe the occasional mollusk, which are, to them, like modestly mobile small fruits and nuts. I have doubts.

Like many folks, I have the tradition of cooking a big turkey Xmas dinner with all the fixings, and then we eat it for the rest of the week until we're finally sick of it. This is Elmo's most favorite meal. The cranberry sauce, yams, wild rice, succotash, it all rocks. But without question his absolute favorite is a turkey (or chicken) thigh or wing bone.

Elmo digs into bones with gusto. He doesn't care so much about any meat on it. Instead, he goes for the joints and end caps, which he devours. Lots of fat and calcium, I suppose. Then it's onto the main course. Skillfully, he cracks the bone, peels away chunks of it and eats out the marrow inside. He works his way down it, cracking and peeling off chunks, eating out the marrow, until finally it's done. Then he requests another one.

I can tell from watching that this is instinctive behavior. There are ways that he acts around eating artificial foods that make it clear that he is adapting natural behaviors to novel edibles. This doesn't look like that. He knows exactly what to do with the medium-sized bone and dispatches it efficiently. I am quite convinced this is normal, wild behavior for him.

So what do African Grays eat in their natural environment? I don't know. Lizards? Rodents? Smaller birds? Do they scavenge the kill of other animals? None of my books have anything to say on the subject, but I am am inclined to think that when we have jokingly referred to him as our "little feathered velociraptor," there may have been more truth in that than we knew.

Ctein

Strange objects appear in the air above us on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by James B: "Ctein, I am glad to see you are still with us—Mike's post of yesterday entitled 'Ctein's Corollary' had me panicked for a moment, as I glanced and mistook the word for 'coronary.'

"By strange coincidence, the BBC today published something on a fossilised velociraptor's last meal, which was, I'm sure you have guessed, a pterosaur's wing and bones. Perhaps Elmo is merely reverting to the call of the wild?

"An old Jack Russell dog, owned by a good friend of mine certainly did react to Christmas trees. In his first year while being house-trained he was taught to go outside and do his business under a tree in the garden. You can imagine the pup's confusion when a tree was brought into the house and placed on a grass-green carpet. He thought he was doing the right thing...."

By Ctein

When I first wrote about the art of tea, I mentioned pu erhs, and several people asked me what they were.

It's no wonder. Pu erh teas have only been freely available in the U.S. for a score of years, and so are little-known and even less understood. Some of them have a unique flavor most commonly (and accurately) translated as "dirt," but describing all pu erhs that way would be no more accurate than describing all cheeses as being cheddary. The variety of flavors available in pu erhs makes them perhaps the most diverse of the groups of teas.

A new pu erh may be drinkable, but it is as likely to be bitter or astringent. Pu erh teas, though, are not merely dead dried leaves; they are chemically and biologically active. Pu erhs are supposed to age. Think cheeses and wines. The leaves continue to undergo oxidative and enzymatic changes, and they harbor microflora that further digest and ferment them. Pu erhs are eminently drinkable within a few years, but it can take anywhere from 10 years to 60 years for them to become truly brilliant. And, just as with cheeses and wines, many of them become totally forgettable.

Pu erhs come in four major types. Each type has its own broad flavor characteristics. Uncooked is traditional. The leaves are packed together, either loosely or compacted into bricks and bings (discs), where they start to age. Over the long run, uncooked pu erhs are more likely to produce the most spectacular teas.

Cooked pu erh is either gently heated or allowed to heat more from fermentation. This greatly accelerates the aging process producing a mature beverage much more quickly, but also denatures some of the chemical/biological components, so a cooked pu erh ages much less later. Like the uncooked versions, it can be aged as loose-leaf or compacted.

When it comes to brewing, pu erhs are practically bulletproof and thrive on vigorous brewing. They are one of the few teas where the universal recommendation is to start with boiling water. Brewing times range from 1 to 5 min., typically, but it's pretty much impossible to overbrew these teas. A half hour steep may produce a brew stronger than one would like (and so need a bit of dilution), but it will be flavorful, not bitter.

Pu erhs are designed for multiple infusions. I had one very nice pu erh that was only good for three brewings and I felt kind of, well, cheated. Another one was still doing well on the eighth pot. The flavor can change with each successive brew. A pu erh may be intensely dirty and smoky on the first pour and by the fifth be so grassy and fragrant that you'd think it was a floral tea. I can have one pu erh pot that I'm drinking from for the entire day, and it's like I'm drinking a whole bunch of different kinds of tea.

This unique characteristic, combined with the wide variety of flavors that pu erhs have to begin with, makes it pretty much impossible to characterize them as a group.

The ongoing aging process that makes pu erhs so fascinating is responsible for my comment last time that they are simultaneously some of the best bargains you can buy and an easy way to go bankrupt. For proper aging, the leaves are kept slightly warm (room temperature or a bit above), definitely dry, away from light, and open to air, because many of the reactions are aerobic ones. Paper's a common wrap. If you find a bing that is sealed in airtight plastic it's likely to be very cheap and of low quality.

Do not judge a bing by its cover. These are all very cheap pu erhs, colorful boxes notwithstanding. Entirely drinkable, entirely uninspiring. But with time, who knows?

Low grade but entirely drinkable bings in the 12 ounce range are available for prices between $5 and $15 in many Chinese markets. At that price, one can afford to experiment. Jon Singer picked up a very cheap bing in a market a dozen years back. Some of it was put aside and forgotten until about a year ago. When brewed up, it was so complicated and subtle that Jon and I couldn't describe it. We could pick out a slightly lemony flavor note, but it was like trying to pick one single instrument out of a large orchestra. It was as far from smoky and dirty as you could imagine.

Jon sent me a couple of these very cheap bings. They are drinkable, if uninspiring, and I've put one of them in the back of the cupboard to see what it is like in another decade or so. It'll probably be lousy, but what the heck, it was $6.

Three excellent and promising pu erhs. The two on the left came from Cha Guan and are no longer available, while the small bing on the right is one I just acquired from TeaSource.

Excellent bings and bricks go for $30–$60 when relatively young; my absolute favorite pu erh is a 500 gram brick that cost me $40 (that's enough for the better part of a year's worth of steady tea drinking). Daniel at Cha Guan (see my earlier tea post) was so proud of this find that he made it his shop's signature tea until it ran out. It's so smoky on the first pour it's like drinking a campfire, and it changes wonderfully with successive infusions. I was suffficiently impressed that I ordered a second brick and that is in the back of a cupboard. I'll see what happens to it in another decade. Truth is, I'm only a third of the way through the first brick after a year and a half.

Here's where financial madness can set in. You can acquire huge numbers of bings at individually reasonable prices. Before you know it, you have a substantial fortune tied up in dried camellia leaves (with the risk of finding down the line that you have the caffeinated equivalent of vinegar.) Happily, I do not have the collector allele in my genome. Still, one is tempted, especially when someone like Roy Fong comes back with a taster's set of eight bings, designed to appeal to a variety of palates and situations and which he has even greater hopes for when aged. A mere $350. I resisted. But I thought about it.

You don't want to know what will happen to the prices of some of these when they are fully aged, if they turn out to be as good as hoped. Really, you don't. Small amounts of the very best aged pu erhs sell for princely sums. I've never tried them; I never expect to. Fortunately, I am entirely happy with my modestly priced, delicious brews.

Ctein

Sometimes, Ctein's off-topic columns on TOP grow on you, and get better with age. If you don't like them now, set them aside for a little while. Who knows what might happen?

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Featured Comment by Mano: "Here in China (hello from China), puer tea is widely considered to be top dog, though a few years ago there was a scandal that this prized symbol of Chinese culture was actually being produced in Africa and sold in the country with fraudulent credentials. Back then you could spend the typical worker's entire year salary on a quarter kilo brick of the tea; after the African issues and other problems with hoarders and speculators the price of the tea dropped like a rock. Now anyone can get a decent aged tea for an affordable price, and it has become very common. In fact I may have a few bricks of it sitting in the back of some cupboard in my kitchen. People like to give it to each other as gifts, which get given again to other people because no one can drink all of it."

Featured Comment by Fabian: "I will check back in a decade or so, to see if I hate this article by then. Today, though, I found it to be a very interesting and inspiring read. 'Drinking a campfire' certainly sounds like something worth testing! Thanks, Ctein!"

Featured Comment by Bob Rosinsky: "I never did get the 'tea' thing. My grandfather used to drink Lipton Tea. He'd plop the tea bag into a cup and add a couple of little saccharine tablets to it to sweeten it up. He was an odd man."

Featured Comment by Jerry Lewis-Evans: "Pu erh, or a phrase sounding phonetically similar, was a phrase that cropped up on various live Frank Zappa albums. It seemed to be one of those band 'in' jokes, but being from England I always took it to be a phrase that you would say while holding your nose to indicate an unpleasant smell! Maybe he was just indicating that it was time for a tea break!"

By Ctein

Okay, so my "keeping the 'X' (as in, the unknown) in 'Xmas'" column normally appears the week of the solstice. There's a good reason it's a week late this year.

I forgot.

When I did remember, I had already done my "Art of Tea" column and didn't want to run two off-topic columns in a row, so I put this off another week. Consequently, a somewhat delayed Salubrious Solstice to you all. Now off we go, into the wild blue yonder.

The title of this column is a quote from Enrico Fermi, infamously referred to as the "Fermi Paradox." The infamy lies in the fact that it is not anything like a paradox; it is simply a statement of utter ignorance. Why that is so will be the topic of this week's column.

The Fermi question concisely goes like this: there are tens of billions of planetary systems in this galaxy alone, thousands of quintillions in the observable universe. Even if only 1% of those develop life, even if only 1% of those life bearing planets develop intelligent life, even if only 1% of those intelligent life forms develop advanced technology, that's a heck of a lot of technologically-advanced, intelligent species out there. Furthermore, based upon the single data sample we have, it takes less than one third the age of the universe to go from a coalescing cloud of gas to an advanced technological intelligence. There's been plenty of time for other intelligences to evolve, several times over, and to advance far beyond us.

So far, though, we've seen no broadly-convincing evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence—and it ought to be pretty obvious. Hence the paradox.

Except it's not really a paradox. That word assumes we understand the situation well enough to see a logical contradiction. Let me illustrate. If I become reasonably convinced that millions of people every year travel by airplane, but every airport I visit and every airplane I inspect is empty of people, then I've got a logical problem. I understand air travel well enough to know that these two observations—millions of travelers, and empty airports—aren't compatible. Something must be wrong in my assumption.

But try this one on: if a god (or gods) exists, she can certainly work miracles. Yet, as I walk through the world, it does not seem to be lousy with self-evident, irrefutable miracles. So, obviously there are no gods.

Well, anyone above the grade school level can poke holes in that logic. It assumes you actually have some idea of what a god would think, what she would want to do, what would be her motivation for having created the whole shebang in the first place, etc. Most everybody with a lick of sense, whether or not they believe in a god(s), full well understands that there is no possible way they could have any idea how a god would think. You can't disprove the existence of deities by looking at an absence of miracles, because you have no way to conclude that commonplace miracles are an inevitable consequence of godhood.

The Fermi question is much more like the second than the first. To assume that advanced technological intelligence leads to either a signal, or interstellar travel, that we would recognize as such (that's important) requires making a huge number of unproven and untested assumptions about the physical universe and about what intelligence wants and does. You can create almost any scenario you want to imagine to explain the lack of observable data and at our current level of knowledge it is just as probable as any other scenario. Anything could be true. No thing in particular is very likely to be.

There is one data point we do all know something about: almost everything humans do makes no sense in any abstract, logical way. The overwhelming majority of our time, energy, and resources go into activities that cannot be explained as a consequence of intelligence. They aren't even behaviors that are typical of all species on Earth (although they aren't necessarily unique to ours). We are chock-full of species-specific behaviors that can be explained after the fact but couldn't be predicted purely on the basis of intelligence and certainly weren't inevitable on the basis of biology or evolution. They are just how we work.

Not every human being is subject to all these impulses. A sufficient majority are, across time and space, that it's pretty safe to say they're characteristic of human beings as a species. Individual exceptions noted: Dear Reader, this is not about you. Let me regale you with a short and highly incomplete list. (I intentionally leave out a couple of very obvious biggies, because I don't need them to make the point; I can do it entirely with "trivialities.")

1) Body ornamentation and decoration. Not limited to such things as jewelry or tattoos; includes hairstyling, makeup, clothes or fashion sense of any sort, whatever. All the stuff that goes into making you decide that you "look good" when you face other people.

Imagine how much time and money are expended by every man, woman, and child because they don't feel it is sufficient to simply wash up occasionally and throw on a gunnysack.

2) Food "composition," for lack of a better term. Cats find food that they can play with appetizing, but they sure don't seem to care much how it looks; we'd rather it sat still but are terribly sensitive to the aesthetics. At the high end we have things like sushi; that the low end we have the wonderful cliché movie images of slop being splashed into a tray in a military mess or high school cafeteria line. Makes you lose your appetite just thinking about it, doesn't it?

3) Acquisitiveness. The packrat instinct. Collecting, acquiring, hoarding of any sort far beyond what one can reasonably use within a reasonable period of time. It may be all those books you don't throw out, even though you're hardly likely to read them again. Or all the music you own, regardless of form and format; videotapes, DVDs, stamps, coins, barbwire, cameras or lenses that you haven't picked up in years but you might, you think. Clothing you never wear, furniture stored in the attic along with an extra set of dishes because, well, you never know. Think of how much smaller (and less expensive!) a living space you could dwell in if you limited your ownership to things you might reasonably need in the foreseeable future.

4) Pets. 'Nough said?

5) Real property/territory. Lots of species seem to do just fine without the concept of my/your real estate. Not humans. (Yes, a minority of cultures have explicitly rejected the concept of land ownership but (a) they are not the norm and (b) if the impulse weren't there, there wouldn't be a need to reject it.

6) Religious impulse. Note that this is not the same as theology. The existence (or not) of gods and the inclination to believe in (or not) gods are entirely separate. Humans are intelligent and humans have religious impulse but we have no special reason to think that one is a consequence of the other. It just is.

Now tally it all up. How much of your life, of the totality of society, is consumed and defined by satisfying one or more of these species-specific impulses?

Overwhelmingly, almost every aspect of our lives is driven by this arbitrary set of inclinations that have no connection we understand to technological intelligence. We imagine that the nature and actions of hypothetical advanced civilizations can be rationally discussed and analyzed, yet most of our own is based upon characteristics that have no rationally-predictable basis for existence. They simply are.

We think we can even start to talk sensibly about the Fermi question as being a "paradox?" We don't know enough to make sense out of ourselves. We certainly don't have clues about anyone else.

To paraphrase Pogo, "We have met the X and he is us."

Ctein

Every year around this time, TOP columnist Ctein (it's his only name, and is pronounced "kuh-TINE") puts the X in Xmas.

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Featured Comment by icexe: "Our great advancements in intelligence and technology might simply be meaningless to any far more advanced civilizations out there. Here's an example: There may be a colony of ants living under a rotted tree stump somewhere in the Amazon jungle who consider themselves the master of all they see around them. They have conquered and controlled the world they know. They may even be on a quest to find other 'intelligent' beings like themselves, but so far to no avail. Yet, unbeknownst to them, they share an entire planet with humans, who are thousands of times more intelligent and advanced, who are fully aware that such a thing as ants exist, but who simply don't care enough to ever bother looking for more of them under some random tree stump in some random corner of the world. And even if by the greatest of random chance some humans did stumble upon their nest, any attempt to communicate would be on a level completely unknown and undecipherable to both humans and ants."

Featured Comment by Alastair Smith: "As so often, XKCD put it nicely."

Featured Comment by Trevor Small: "No paradox. The reason we've seen no signs of intelligent life is that Earth is under quarantine. Out there, somewhere, is a whopping great sign that says 'KEEP OUT. INFECTIOUS DISEASE RISK. EARTH HAS HUMANS. HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS.' Or the alien equivalent. Kind of makes you feel proud of our virility, doesn't it."

Featured Comment by Mark L: "There is no doubt that there are more advanced civilations. The odds are stacked against this not being the case. The only questions are: 1) Do they know we are here and 2) what will their intentions be when they know. Let's hope that deep fried human being is not some advanced alien delicacy. And hope that a Canon 1DS can split their exoskeletal big cranium in half if they come for us!"

Featured Comment by Zeeman: "Since this is a photography site, the following begs to be added to Ctein's list of human impulses: 7) The aesthetic impulse, which drives us every day to seek or create what is beautiful. However, given the acquisitiveness of current shutterbugs, it might be that this will eventually converge with #3. Also, given the propensity of acquisitive shutterbugs to worship one among a limited pantheon of deities named Canon, Nikon, etc., the aesthetic impulse might also be headed towards convergence with religion. Now that is scarier than most alien invasion stories."

Featured Comment by Wil: "Jeez, I read to the end of that long article only to find, I don't give a damn."

Featured Comment by Skip Davis: "Sorry I am so late to comment, I was just so taken by this post that I had to think on it a bit. This one post was worth reading this site all year.... There are a lot of things to think about because of it. I am going for a long bike ride today just to enjoy this paradox called life."