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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

blue-footed booby


So, my friend today was mentioning that she was on the good old facebook (what would we all do without the stalker in all of us being so easily enabled) and was looking at a friends pictures from the galapagos. She then mentioned this bird with "baby blue feet" that was so pretty. Being the inherent dork that I am, I promptly asked why their feet may be like that, are they seabirds? do they camouflage to the water or something? My answers didn't seem good enough, my friend was as perplexed (or perhaps really didn't care) as I, and so I decided to look it up. Well, here are my findings, thought you might find them interesting....The bird is actually called the blue-footed booby bird. I have added a picture so that you can better picture the exact creature that I am speaking of. The name "booby" comes from some foreign word bubi or bobi (depending on which source you consult) and meaning "dunce" or "stupid fellow" (once again depending on the source). Either way you get the point, this bird is not the brightest of creatures, or more correctly explained, it is simply very clumsy when on land. I then learned that these blue feet play a very large role in their mating rituals. Evidently the females are attracted to something about these blue feet doing some clearly incredible dancing (I can only imagine the turn-on). Well, if those males can move those flappers in the right way, then they may just find themselves a mate! (they are monogamous or bimogamous if you were curious) so this is quite the big deal, ya know, this whole dancing thing. So, this is probably a better explanation as to why these purty blue feet have developed. This brought me to wonder about our mating rituals, and wow, that gets the wheels turning, but i'll leave that up to each individual to ponder on their own, as I'm sure it tells us something different and unique to each of us. The other reason I found as the likely reason for these feet is simply the fact that there also exists the red-footed booby bird (who knew these things even existed in the first place), and so these different colored feet allow them to tell each other apart....I read this and though to myself, can it really be that basic? We really need different colored feet to tell ourselves apart? but, then again, I looked down at my socks and realized that although not color-coded to mean human, probably human in their own right by the simple fact I was wearing them, and not only that, but they have L and R (p.s. I had them on the wrong feet) for morons like myself (CLEARLY as I couldn't even adequately use them) to tell which foot is which. So then I realized, perhaps it is this simple, perhaps we need simple indicators to tell us many things in life. At any rate, now that we're all updated on the blue-footed booby, i ask you to question, how do your feet look and what do they tell you about yourself? I won't answer that question out loud (it'd be pretty embarassing) and I think you can probably draw your own conclusions from the evidence above. Anyway, just some food for thought.

2 comments:

  1. highly enlightening and thought-provoking... ;)

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  2. You really can't hate anything called a "booby." It seems like the booby and I would get along smashingly.

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