As has been previously documented, I’m not too fond of the holidays. I love my family, but it has been a hard year and some non-Christmasy downtime was required for sanity purposes.
That being said, squeezle and I spent our fabulous December 25th in sunny San Diego, California. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more to expound upon in later postings, but I was reminded by something at the San Diego Wild Animal Park on Sunday: I have an odd fascination with being bitten by waterfowl while on vacation.
No, despite my lack of most morals, this isn’t a sexual thing. When I’m on the road I like to taunt all matter of aquatic avians to take a crack at chomping on me with wild abandon.
It really started on one of our last trips to Disneyworld (yeah, we’re thatkind of weirdo). In a prosecco and beer fueled frenzy (it was Food & Wine Festival season, after all), I managed to get “beaked” by both a male and female mallard as well as some sort of ibis.
Rather than collapse in pain (potentially garnering oodles of cash from the Disney machine), I laughed my ass off and got yet another of my stupid ideas.
So, there I was, a couple of beers into a pretty damn good day around a bunch of animals I could relate to (and the squeezle) and I was faced with a trio of geese who were obviously trying to sleep and ignore the pair of us. I, of course, launch into my approach. It’s horribly easy if you’d like to follow along at home:
- Address your waterfowl of choice to make your presence known.
- Take one step closer to said waterfowl.
- Repeat steps 1 & 2 as needed until beaked.
My intention is never to stress the bird out. The goose who chomped on me in San Diego had been sleeping and was standing on one foot. At the point of impact, he (she, it, etc.) never bothered to put down that second foot and actually tuckered into its wing after masticating me. If that’s not the sign of a non-threatened bird, I’m not sure what is.
I love animals; especially birds. I don’t ever want this to be misconstrued as something done with malicious intent, but, rather, merely for my own amusement. I like to think that my target bird gets a sense of fulfilment from taking a swipe at me without me retaliating in some manner. After thousands of sticky, nasty children potentially provide such horribly undo stress, it’s my public duty to be nature’s punching (or biting) bag.
That emu, however, had better stay the hell away from me.