A rare breed

To my rare birds,

Caledon is a menagerie, a habitat for all manner of rare birds, housing only one of each specimen for study and display, each one as unique in its prismatic coloring as in its enigmatic behavior. Through this flurry of tailfeathers, one can still begin to sense an overarching commonality: the rituals of behavior and mating. However, as one would expect to see in any non-antagonistic, interspecies interactions, there is a great misunderstanding of signaling.

In the past week I've come across more than one incident in which, perhaps, my behavior has been greatly misinterpreted. It was certainly not a negative experience in any way, the dear Lord forbid I ever wax melodramatic, but I feel it bears some reflection given the novel condition of the rarest of animals, the Caledon male. Yes, there is an undue social pressure that perhaps forces you to commit valuable resources to the maintenance of 'high-quality male' fitness attributes, which, as in nature, may cause such levels of physiological stress as to effectively shorten the lifespan of said male, only differentially buffered by his increased lifetime reproductive success. But while this new paradigm has been widely accepted among naturalists within and beyond Caledon, there are a great many who hold onto Lack clutch size theory, suggesting that perhaps the value of a maximized moment measured in units of friendship felt is much more sensible for decisions involving lifetime resource allocation.

And while I may have once viciously tromped Madame Curie in a game of croquet, I am quite far behind the times in terms of theory and will always hold the outdated paradigms of friendship as the most enlightened of thinking.