Attack of the Horny Peacock

Last month I mentioned that I had been in Barcelona at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution conference. I arrived in Spain early in the morning, and, after I got checked in to my hotel, I went with a couple friends to the Barcelona Zoo. This zoo is famous for housing Snowflake, the albino gorilla who lived at the zoo from the mid-1960s until he died in 2003. They still have an impressive collection of primates despite the loss of the zoo's icon.

Additionally, the zoo has a roaming band of peafowl. The peacocks and peahens have free reign of the grounds, and you'll often see them roosting in the trees. When we were there, the males were aggressively courting the females and letting out loud mating calls. I captured this photo of a peacock trying to impress a hen:

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She would have none if it, though. Eventually, the peahen scurried into the bushes, and the peacock wandered off to find a hen that would be impressed by his massive train.

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Many people collect baseball cards, stamps, coins, comic books, rocks, fossils or nutcrackers. I believe I have opened up a whole new field of nerd-dom with my zoo and aquarium shot glass collection.

sir,

your heading implicitly offers up the imprimatur of legitimacy toward a heternormative patriarchal paradigm by making light of the structural biases as if it is a source of mirth as opposed to Oppression.

sincerely,
c. v. snicker