{"id":9002,"date":"2014-07-28T02:07:54","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T09:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=9002"},"modified":"2014-07-28T06:32:17","modified_gmt":"2014-07-28T13:32:17","slug":"beware-the-flesh-eating-crossbill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/28\/beware-the-flesh-eating-crossbill\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware the Flesh-eating Crossbill"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are birds that do not scruple to feed on human flesh. Battlefields have always had their black-garbed attendants in the form of vultures and ravens, and even ruddy turnstones are known to have pecked at a corpse or two.<\/p>\n

But winter finches?<\/p>\n

\"Gesner,<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1555, Conrad Gesner<\/a> reported that he had heard of\u00a0red crossbills dining on cadavers, a distasteful habit mentioned again half a century later in\u00a0Aldrovandi<\/a>‘s account of this “voracissima avis.”<\/p>\n

Three hundred years earlier, the English chronicler Matthew Paris<\/a>\u00a0warned that these birds were actually capable of accelerating the production of human carrion. After extracting the seeds with\u00a0their forceps-like bills, the crossbills in his local orchards left<\/p>\n

the rest of the apple\u00a0…\u00a0poisoned, as if with venom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Be careful out there.<\/p>\n

\"Common<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are birds that do not scruple to feed on human flesh. Battlefields have always had their black-garbed attendants in the form of vultures and ravens, and even ruddy turnstones are known to have pecked at a corpse or two. But winter finches? In 1555, Conrad Gesner reported that he had heard of\u00a0red crossbills dining … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Beware the Flesh-eating Crossbill”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9002"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9002"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9012,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9002\/revisions\/9012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}