“Silent Seasons - Winter,” Will Barnet
Donald Brightsmith, the principal investigator of the Tambopata Macaw Project, located at the Tambopata Research Center (TRC) in Peru, has studied the clay eating behavior of parrots at clay licks in Peru. He and fellow investigators found that the soils macaws choose to consume at the clay licks do not have higher levels of cation exchange capacity (ability to adsorb toxins) than that of unused areas of the clay licks and thus the parrots could not be using the clay to neutralize ingested food toxins. Rather, the macaws and other bird and animal species prefer clays with higher levels of sodium. Sodium is a vital element that is scarce in environments >100 kilometers from the ocean.
Someday, I don’t know how
I hope she’ll hear my plea
Some way, I don’t know how
She’ll bring her love to me
Dream lover, until then
I’ll go to sleep and dream again
That’s the only thing to do
Till all my lover’s dreams come true
Why do macaws eat clay? Scientists think
it’s for the salt. Many miles from the sea
salt spray isn’t free so geophagy
gets the birds salt they can’t randomly drink.
Geophagy. The word requires a wink.
Eating the earth to keep yourself healthy.
Eating dirt, so reads this cryptic study,
is like drinking ocean—a mystic link.
I’m dreaming of parrots in Ecuador
instead of sailing off from the East Coast
into the sea’s Bermuda Triangle
and escaping out through that mystic door
to the lost embrace of that cryptic host.
Dream birds tug at strings, dream knots untangle.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A Craft Of Knots
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This Scary, Pumpkin Time Of Year, Part Two
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