My ideas on why children feel the need to be up your butt while you are trying to do things like wash the dishes or talk on the phone

Okay, so basically there are two types of offspring: precocial and altricial. There are gradiations in between that are recognized too, especially in bird species, but we're not going to discuss them here.

Precocial young are relatively advanced when they are born, able to move on their own, can eat solid food, and already have some behavior patterns developed. Mallard ducks are an example. For instance, the mother, while incubating the eggs, emits vocalizations (which are similar to the ones she will use to call the babies into the nest later). So she thereby imprints her young to her voice before they hatch. Soon after hatching, the young are ready to leave the nest, but recognize the mother's voice and return to the nest when they hear it (Drickamer et al. 2002).

Altricial young are very helpless at birth, requiring lots of care and maintenance from the parent(s). They usually cannot move or eat on their own, and usually cannot even eat solid food. Songbirds and parrots fall into this category. Obviously, so do humans.

Now, evolutionarily, parents want to have as many offspring as possible to pass on their genes. However, each offspring requires an investment on the part of the parent (which will be different depending on the gender of the parent, their degree of involvement in incubation, nuturing, etc.) Parental investment includes any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases that offspring's chance of surviving (i.e. reproducing) at the cost of that parent's ability to invest in other offspring (Drickamer et al. 2002). Usually females have a higher reproductive cost. (But we women already knew this; it takes the men to reason it out and write it down to realize it I guess). Parents will invest more time in fewer individual young for several reasons: when their own chances of surviving decrease; when food is hard to obtain; when they are sure that the offspring is their own (and they want to make sure the genes get passed on. However, the parents should not invest too much care in just one offspring, unless that's the only chance they have. From the offspring/child's perspective, they want want lots and lots of care, because this will help their own survival and ability to reproduce later on.

What this means is that, from an evolutionary standpoint, children do not see activities such as washing dishes and talking on the phone as contributing to their overall survival, so they try to force you to pay attention them instead. This also shows up as sibling rilvalry. Of course, at some point, they should realize that it is safer for them in the long run to let Mommy finish doing the dishes before they harass her to play games, because otherwise they will end up helping.

Save a Squirrel????

This morning it was brought to my attention that the British have begun to practice a sort of biological control of their own: eating the overinvasive grey squirrel population.

The American grey squirrel managed to invade England, and was originally believed only to compete with the British red squirrel for habitat and resources. However, it has recently been discovered that the grey squirrel has an immunological advantage as well: the squirrel poxvirus. Grey squirrels are carriers of the virus, and not affected by it. Red squirrels, once exposed, develop sores and ulcers, and eventually die, usually within two weeks. There is no vaccine for this virus, so researchers proposed strategies for heading off the disease at identified 'grey squirrel gateway' points within the country. Large culling of the grey squirrel population would be effective, but time consuming and impractical.

There are those who are willing to do their part, however. Grey squirrel removal has been done in stages, focused in small areas, and studied throughout so that time series data on both grey and red populations can be obtained. Unfortunately, it only takes a few infected greys to spread squirrel poxvirus to the reds and kill them off.

Of course, all that meat should not go to waste. And it is not, apparently. You can now get squirrel and hazelnut pâté, available at patchwork-pate.co.uk.

And now I have a confession to make. This fall I tasted my first squirrel. It was cooked in a pan, and looked like it had just been shot out of the tree, with all its limbs splayed out (no head). There were lots of small bones. There was more meat than I expected, but there were still a lot of bones. And it did not taste like chicken. It just tasted like meat. With carrots and potatoes, it wasn't too bad. I'm not sure how it would be with hazelnuts. But then, I never really was a fan of pâté; it looks too much like cat food. Seems a fitting end for a squirrel though. What would be even better is if the dog could somehow get in on it too...