Some things don't taste like chicken

A friend in Hawaii sent me mail about her moral dilemma: she loves Monarch butterflies and she loves her baby crown flower plant... but so do the Monarchs, one of which has laid an egg on it. She's trying to decide whether to let the caterpillar-to-be stay there and probably munch her plant to death, or whether to squish the egg.

(I voted for letting the baby butterfly munch the plant because, besides being mildly interesting, if one monarch found it, the odds are good that others will. My friend can watch Nature in Action but will have to reconcile herself to buying a new plant after caterpillar season every year. Maybe she coulld consider it her contribution to the Maui gardening/nursery industry.)

But that is not why I am blogging. No, no, I am blogging because her message reminded me of something else entirely and now I'm bouncy and happy and I have to share.* (Though I doubt this is news to those of you (you know who you are) who pay more attention to The World of Science and Bugs than I do.)

Mr. Elinoire often has the TV on while he's using his laptop. The other day we caught a bit of a show about birds. The narrator told us that the small colorful bird onscreen was called the Ptui bird (or at least that's what it sounded like) and I said "wouldn't it be GREAT if was called that because it tastes really bad?"

Mr. Elinoire agreed that it would.

And then (this makes me so happy I can hardly sit still and it's tough to type when you're bouncing around) the narrator said that the birds eat a nasty-tasting beetle and so they (the birds) taste terrible. Isn't that fabulous?! You'd actually take a bite of this little red or yellow bird and then spit it out and say it's name at the same time!


Sometimes life is just beautiful. And Google? Google is amazing. I cannot believe I tracked down a page on Pitohuis. (Having no idea how their name was spelled, I just kept adding things like "taste" "bird" "bad" "beetle" to my search.)

I read the whole article and kept waiting for the punchline, but nowhere does it point out that a word pronounced "ptui" is a hilarious name for a bird that tastes bad (but looks pretty enough to eat).**

Wikipedia took the purely scientific and rational approach, too. Huh.

I am not, however, the very first person to ask the tough questions.

* Because Monarchs are infamous for tasting really bad. I know this because I have a book about them.

** My sister's response to following quote in the article linked above: "'I was given a juvenile variable pitohui,' Gregory said, 'and when I licked the feathers, I felt my mouth tingle and go numb.'"

Who the hell does that? If I gave you a random wild bird (or even a domestic, relatively clean bird) would it ever, in a million years, seem to you that the right thing to do was to lick it?

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, perhaps this Gregory person had heard about pitohui birds being poisonous, so there was some reason to investigate. But wouldn't that be an even more complelling reason not to lick the bird?