Lexigame Community
General Category => Words => Topic started by: pat on February 26, 2019, 07:32:57 PM
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I was dead chuffed to spot chachalaca in the halcyon puzzle and equally disappointed when it was rejected.
Chachalacas are common (and very noisy) birds of central and south America. The word would never be a seed word in the 10-letter puzzle and may never appear again in the 7-by-many but I'd like to suggest its inclusion, just in case.
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It really is a common bird (or birds, since there's more than one species). I saw my first one years ago in Texas, more in Tobago, and most recently in Costa Rica.
The word is onomatopoeic - they really are shouting their name.
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The word is onomatopoeic - they really are shouting their name.
But different species have different calls. The rufous-headed chachalacas I heard in Ecuador were definitely shouting ‘Give that back’!
Actually I was ‘attacked’ by one in Ecuador. A couple of them had become domesticated and were hanging about hoping for handouts so I got some fruit to hand feed them. One gently took a piece from my hand but the other one didn’t quite have the knack and pecked at my hand hard enough to bruise it. I quickly dropped the fruit and tried to shoo the bird away but I think it mistook my hand movements for more offers of food. It jumped up onto my lap and from there onto my head! (Heart attack material, Linda? They’re chicken-sized.)
Here's a photo of one.
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Well, I learn so many things on this forum. When I read the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about the musical rhythmic
Boom chachalaca boom boom chachalacalaca :D
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It jumped up onto my lap and from there onto my head! (Heart attack material, Linda? They’re chicken-sized.)
I feel ill just thinking about it, Pat. Poor you, although I suspect you were in your element ... a bird on the head is worth ....
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Well, I learn so many things on this forum. When I read the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about the musical rhythmic
Boom chachalaca boom boom chachalacalaca :D
Same!
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But different species have different calls. The rufous-headed chachalacas I heard in Ecuador were definitely shouting ‘Give that back’!
Actually I was ‘attacked’ by one in Ecuador. A couple of them had become domesticated and were hanging about hoping for handouts so I got some fruit to hand feed them. One gently took a piece from my hand but the other one didn’t quite have the knack and pecked at my hand hard enough to bruise it. I quickly dropped the fruit and tried to shoo the bird away but I think it mistook my hand movements for more offers of food. It jumped up onto my lap and from there onto my head! (Heart attack material, Linda? They’re chicken-sized.)
Here's a photo of one.
That's one I haven't seen. I've only seen the plain and the gray-headed.
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Next time you're in Ecuador, Pat, save some memory card space for the butterflies while photographing the birds. Ecuador has over 3,000 species. :)
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For me, it's less the memory card than the camera battery - I've been known to go through three rechargeable batteries a day. I usually only have to change the multi-gigabyte memory card once during the trip.
And I probably end up with fewer birds than you'd think, because they are up there high in the trees, moving and ducking behind bunches of leaves or flying away faster than my camera and I can focus. Tropical butterflies seem to flutter even faster than my local ones, so I have fewer photos than I like. Maybe that's why I'm taking more photos of plants and flowers and sedentary bugs than I used to.
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I'm a bit surprised the word isn't already in our list, because it's in plenty of dictionaries. I'll add it as a rare word.
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Thanks, Alan.