Yesterday, Kevin Lucas posted about a strange form of a Williamson's Sapsucker he discovered - his photos showed the bilateral differences and 3 of our Tweets so far have chimed in with suggestions of it being an example of a "chimaera" and/or one of "bilateral melanism". Devorah gave an excellent description of the biology behind these 2 and concluded that she thought this to be a bilaterally-melanistic chimaera.
Both new concepts and words to add to my vocabulary.
Then today, on the entertaining and intriguing NPR radio show, RadioLab on KUOW 94.9 FM (and tomorrow at 2 or 3 p.m. on KPLU) and perhaps available already as a podcast on KUOW.org or somesuch, the topic of the show is weird/and created life forms. Sure enough, "chimaera" was one of the main subjects of this week's show !! I don't believe that birds were mentioned, but other abnormal life forms were and it was, as well as highly entertainingly educational, very provocative. You might want to check it out - sorry, I'm too lazy to look up a podcast link, but I'm sure you can find it if you are so inclined.

Thanks to Kevin, Loren, Jeff K and Devorah for stimulating more discussion. :-)


Barb Deihl
Matthews Beach Neighborhood - NE Seattle
barbdeihl at comcast.net