in the dark there is discovery

as the snake sheds her skin 🐍🩸

the one I was looking for originally also has a summer variant. (artist is Frederick Charles Herrick: 'it is warmer below' is from 1927, 'it is cooler below' is 1926)

We have Kea, Kākā, Kākāpō, and Kākāriki (of which there are 3 species).

Kākā are more olive brown than green but are really neat and beautiful birds and are growing in numbers thanks to conservation efforts.

Kea are mostly green with red underwings and b will pickpocket you, but then again so will weka. The bit about them stopping traffic is absolutely true - I have a friend who has witnessed this.

Kākāpō are, in the words of my ecology professor, “really bad at being parrots”. They suck, but endearingly so. They are so bad at being alive and climbing things and reproducing but you cannot help but love them. Again, they are green, but in a shambling moss pile sort of way.

Kākāriki are much smaller and are kept as pets internationally. The three kinds are the red crowned, the yellow crowned and the orange fronted. Of these, the latter is the rarest (currently critically endangered).

There are also several other species endemic to various outlying islands. We have, in total, nine surviving endemic parrot species and several subspecies of those.

Holly Mop who was beside me in bed got up and trotted into my office. Came back into the bedroom and very daintily spat out a single potato chip.

Which has revealed two things:

A) that she does understand more of what I’m saying, and in true Shih Tzu fashion,chooses not to listen and

B) there’s a stash of stale potato chips somewhere in my office I’ll need to find tomorrow.

Emphasis on tomorrow