Trip to Los Angeles

I went to Los Angeles today. From a window high above Bunker Hill, well above the helicopter pad on the adjacent building, I saw two or three violet-green swallows. I haven't ever seen those from my window in San Francisco, although I see them elsewhere in the Bay Area from time to time. I saw another turkey vulture, too.

Once on a trip to Los Angeles several years ago, I saw a flock of parrots eating fruit from trees in the park outside the Pershing Square Metro station. They were making a huge racket and flinging bits of fruit all around. I remember the fruit as avocados, although walking past today I didn't see any avocado trees so maybe I was misremembering. But there was no mistaking the parrots. The funny thing was that the co-worker who was with me didn't even notice them until I said, "wow, that's a lot of parrots." They couldn't have been making a bigger fuss if they had been a crowd of teenagers, but he was just tuned out to them.

Also at the airport I got to see a crow demonstrating the famed corvid problem-solving behavior. The bird had scored a big piece of bagel, about one-third of the whole bagel. It caught my attention by dropping its big piece of bagel in a puddle and then landing next to it. At first I thought, "that's too bad for you," but the bird didn't pick up the bagel and move on. Instead, it stood there picking off small pieces of the apparently rock-hard bagel, dropping them one by one in the puddle, and then eating them. I guess it likes its bagels dunked. While it ate I could see its tongue (sort of silvery, like a hummingbird's tongue, not pink and textured like a person's or a goose's) and the inside of its bill (white).