A New Bird Joins our Nest: Kenai

We had another new bird join our nest recently. ...Well, maybe not so recently; he joined us in June, when we were in Alaska! It's one of the things that's been stuck in my blog backlog.



"Kenai", our newest bird, is the bald eagle on the right in this photo. The other eagle, "Baldy", is one of the OGs and has been with us for over 20 years.

Hawk and I like to make up funny stories with our stuffed animals. Note that's funny as in Joe Pesci's classic "Funny how?" scene in Goodfellas. It's both funny as in amusing and as in... weird.

For years we said Baldy was a male eagle. But while he happily helped raise chicks in our stories he never displaying male courting or mating behaviors. We always played him as uncomfortable when storytelling got around to whether he'd mate with a female. Ultimately he'd back out. "That's okay, Baldy's gay," we'd say. But he didn't mate with males, either. "Okay, he's asexual. He has platonic relationships and helps other birds raise young."

Then we brought Kenai home. The first thing Kenai did was laugh at us. "Baldy is female," Kenai pointed out.

Even wildlife experts among us humans can only make educated guesses about which sex a bird is. There are cases where even the experts who work with birds every day have misidentified a bird's sex, like the case where "Romeo", a vulture in captivity, laid an egg after several years. Since then she's been "Juliet". But while humans make guesses that are sometimes wrong, birds know. Scientists believe one of the cues is distinctive coloration differences that are outside the visual spectrum of the human eye but within the range of what the birds can see.

As part of our storytelling we came up with justifications for why we were mistaken about Baldy. 🤣 You see, bald eagles all seem kind of male by human socialization standards. They live in the wilderness. They hunt all their food. They fight to protect their territory. And if there were such a thing as Eagle Tinder, you can bet that just about every picture on there would be an eagle holding a fish it had just caught. So very male! 🤣

So now we know Baldy's female. She's still asexual, though. And that's totally okay.

Breaking Bad S2E1: Why it's Hard to Buy Cold Medicine

In Season 2 of Breaking Bad Walt decides it's time to scale up the drug making operation. There's a supply chain problem with going big, though. Jesse has been sourcing pseudephedrine pills, an over-the-counter cold medicine that can be crushed up and used as of the key precursors to making methamphetamine, by sending a network of buyers out to drugstores to buy boxes. He can manage that at small scale but not 5x or 10x the quantity because in 2008, when the show was filmed, there were already laws limiting the sale of pseudephedrine— because of exactly the criminal drug-making this show is about.

Pseudephedrine is a common medication that is sold under the brand name Sudafed and plenty of generics. Except it's not so common anymore. Long ago I could just pop into a CVS when I was feeling sick, but a few bottles of different pills, and get relief. A 2006 federal law required stores to limit purchases and check ID. I remember blogging years ago that I had to show more ID to buy cough syrup than I had to show to vote. And in that case, the thing I was buying didn't even contain pseudephedrine. The government's clamp-down was so tough that retailers acted out of fear and limited not just pseudephedrine but anything that seemed even vaguely similar to it.

Today I can still buy pseudephedrine, by going to the pharmacist who keeps it locked behind the counter. I still have to show ID, which is recorded, and I'm still limited in how much I can purchase at a time. But the stores don't always stock it. This is one of the other consequences of strict limits: it gets basically taxed out of existence. Make it hard to get, and people will give up trying to get it. When people stop trying to buy it, even for legit uses, stores stop stocking it regularly. Why carry something for which there's little demand?

Meanwhile the pharmacy and pharmaceutical industries shifted to foist a stupid placebo on us. They replaced pseudephedrine with phenylephrine— a drug that was proven not to work. Thanks, meth makers, you made it harder to for the rest of us to treat our colds and allergies. And thanks, War on Drugs, Big Pharma, and Weak-Kneed FDA. 👎