I got home from doing TalkChat tonight, and I was wondering about something. We regularly talk about animals on our discussion-type radio show, because that's what my roommate and I talk about around the house. We like animals.

So there's this bird called the kakapo that used to live in New Zealand, back before European settlers arrived. It is believed that at first--millions of years ago--they were unremarkable parrots, except for their strangely fragrant odor, but once they migrated to the pristine and predator-free islands of New Zealand, they got a little lazy. By the time humans arrived, first from Polynesia and later from Europe, the kakapo had evolved into a fat, contented and very friendly parrot that could not fly and was soon poached down to very scant numbers.

Part of the problem was the kakapo's peculiar mating habits. The kakapo mates once every couple of years--or tries to, at least. In order to attract females during mating season, male kakapos dig themselves big bowls in the dirt, then sit in these bowls and screech a very low-pitched, booming screech that can be heard for miles in any direction. However, much like the dilemma of the bass car in the crowded parking lot, the females have a hard time finding where exactly the male is booming from because as a matter of basic physics, bass vibrations are hard to localize. To make up for this, a male kakapo will boom up to six hours every night for months on end in the hopes that a female will actually show up at his hole, but this doesn't always happen.

I guess the lesson is that in nature, as in romance, the secret is in being in the right place at the right time. But whatever. I just thought it was a cool bird, and I wanted to be able to find it later. I mean, for years I've been calling it the ack-ack, which itself is my garbled interpretation of the Aye-Aye lemur. But there's supposedly a video that I would like to watch later too, so... lemurs, man. Lemurs.