Spiders and Birds

Juno is sitting on her food dish watching me work. “C’mere,” she says every couple of minutes. If she follows her usual pattern, she’ll get tired of waiting for me and climb down to the bottom of her cage to do her Let Me Out Dance…yup, there she goes. She’s running back and forth along the bottom squeaking “C’mere.”

It’s very cute, but there’s also a mild creepiness mixed in somewhere. She knows what c’mere means, and uses it in context. This is an extremely small brain we’re talking about, but it’s still cross-species communication. Well, maybe it’s more like her delivering orders, but it’s still one species saying to the other, “C’mere,” or “Hey bird,” which she also uses properly (as a greeting).

There was a book I read…I must have still been in school. I don’t remember the title, but it was “hard” scifi–the type that applies proper (for our time, anyway) scientific methods to stories. In it, when humans make first contact with aliens, it’s through…mathematics.

Yes. No “ET phone home” here. Just E=MC squared. Or something like that. I’m probably oversimplifying the actual exchange, but that’s all I recall of it.

Meanwhile, my bird knows exactly what she’s saying in English, and uses it to her advantage. Not that Juno is smarter than an alien, but…it’s almost the same kind of communication.

I am presently under siege by an enemy force. Yesterday I had a run-in with what I can only describe as a megabeast, a spider so huge it…well, it didn’t seem to be a spider.

My screen doors suck, and my landlord hasn’t gotten around to replacing them. Hence when I leave the windows open to get in some airflow, things come inside. The spider problem has been horrendous this summer.

I disposed of the spider and thought that was the end of it…but no. This morning while I was changing Juno’s food, I realized something in her dish was moving.

This other spider wasn’t as big as the previous one, but it was still too large for comfort. She’s singing happily atop her cage, so I don’t think she got bitten, but I am keeping an eye on her. 

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