The toucan flies again - São Paulo

Toucan is my co-pilot. Toucan in the freezer bag on the way to school.

Okay, as most of you readers know, I have been in possession of a frozen toucan for about a week. It's all explained in this blog about my BMIL but to summarize, a toucan was killed at the ranch in Ribeirão Preto last week. It made a wrong move near the electric transformer.  It is in perfect condition--seems that there may be a slight burn on one wing (it is a little browned) but the feathers are in great shape, the beak technicolor and it looks like it could wake up and wing off at any time.

So Toucan has been in the freezer here with the barbecue meat (who's coming over?) and today I brought him to the kids' classrooms for show and tell. (sorry, no photos because I have a policy about photos of kids and identifying my kids' school). 

I was there for reading mum with the first graders, and it was an hour of anticipation until I got free to support the presentation. I have to say again and again how much I love my kids' school. It is all about experience as part of learning. And of course, the last unit of the year last year was the rainforest--the classrooms split up into smaller groups to study certain animals. One of my sons was in the coral snake group and one in the jaguar group. There was a toucan group too.

In one son's classroom, the kids were amazed and excited by the bird. They all wanted to touch it. They all wanted to know more about how we got it. In the other room, the kids split into a large group who went crazy for it and wanted to pet it and hold it and then a much smaller group of (mostly girls. oh all right, to be honest, it was all girls) who yelled "How disgusting!". 

Let me make it clear that there were two girls in the toucan group who helped me tell about the toucan and they were not at all disgusted. They were excited to meet their research subject (albeit a dead research subject). They told the class about what toucans ate, that there were five types of toucans, and one kind was extinct--the green-beaked toucan.  Other kids piped up with more information about what they ate (fruit, lizards, eggs). 

As for the two girls who yelled about how disgusting a dead animal is, I met up with them in the girls bathroom as I went to wash my hands. They were still squealing and hugging because of a dead bird. I asked them if they ate beef. They said yes. I said, you do know that is a dead animal, right? So, sorry about turning your kids vegetarians, moms, but you need to buck them up a bit if you want them to get into Wellesley.

A few other teachers came by to see about the ruckus. It was a wonderful ten minutes out of a day full of chores (I am now home waiting for the painter, the security camera guy and the stove repair guy). Next stop for the toucan is yet to be determined. I am talking to a mom of one of the kids because she works for a NGO that works with saving the rainforest. I will also contact USP to see if they want it for their small animal museum.

For now, my frozen toucan is back with the barbecue meat. I might be as everyday crazy as the BMIL.

Moss bonkers - São Paulo

 

I was cleaning out my office and ran across this newspaper ad from back in September. I had put it aside because I thought it was so well done...and then forgot about it. It still makes me smile. Especially when I think about my dad warning me of "moss bonkers" when I was a kid--some scary beasties in the dark deep of the local river in Connecticut. Usually the moss bonker was my labrador. 

In this case, the moss bonkers live in the Tiete River. It is one of the dirtiest rivers on the planet. I have no data to back this up but will tell you that I have seen all kinds of sludge and yuck in there, and once saw the rescue workers pull a dead body out. It's not pretty.

This page looks like a movie ad for a movie called "Zumbis Pneumaticos" or Pneumatic Zombies. And then below it talks about how these are the living dead that inhabit the river bed of the Tiete River and that they take years to decompose. And then it encourages people to provide a happy ending by sending used tires to be recycled. 

The campaign is supported by the water company, the SP state government, a NGO working to save the rainforest and two radio stations. I am impressed with the message and the delivery. 

Visit facebook.com/tietevivo for more information.

Caja-manga - Ribeirão Preto

This photo is of one of my kids picking up ripe caja-manga from the ground at his grandma's ranch. In the end, none of the caja-manga was edible--it was already attacked by the little beasties of the ground. 

Caja-manga is one of the many fruits I have met here in Brazil. It looks a lot like a mango, but I personally like the taste of the mango better. It goes by many names: taperebazeiro, macucu, cajá, cajazeira, cajá-mirim, cajamanga, cajá-manga, taperebá, tamacoaré, tamaquaré-serrado, cajazeiro tapiribá, acaiamiri, acaíba, cajá-pequeno, cajá-miúdo (source here).

Photo credit: http://aryansantosaryel.blogspot.com.br/2011/05/fruto-do-caja-manga.html

It does seem to cure most ills. As I read from the source above, I see that it can help with the following:  fevers, constipation, stomach aches, postpartum pain, certain eye and larynx problems, and the pulp can sometimes cure cystitis. Some even believe that if you burn it, the smoke will cure ulcers or other "injuries."

It's quite a fruit.

Werewolves - Joanópolis

Emporio Cachoeira: where we fill up on cheese and munchies before braving the werewolves...

This is a photo out the window in the middle of Joanópolis, the "cidade-sede" or headquarters of our rented country house. It's a pretty city and bears exploring more when I'm not piled into the car with kids, dogs and food for a week. This never happens.

Joanópolis is known for two things. Well, okay, I know it for two things, most people for one. The first one, of minor fame, is that it is absolutely chock-o-block with Fuscas. You know, the old VW beetles. There are some from the 1950s all the way up to the more recent maybe 1980s versions. I've never seen the New Beetle but it could be around. There are so many Fuscas that I call it Fuscópolis. I think I wrote a blog on it somewhere. Ah, here it is.

The second thing is for real fame. It is the worldwide capital of Lobisomen, or Werewolves. Yes, this cute little town of 12,000 has the most number of reports of werewolf sightings in the world. Not including the stuffy ones outside every store (you can take your picture with the two in the photo above).

Now, I have no fear of werewolves. There are other scarier things in this country (motoboys, the stupid bugs that chewed me up this weekend, etc). But I did some reading about them this morning and I might have to go take my kids to be baptized after all. Apparently they chomp non-baptized kids! Or maybe they just have to wear silver all the time. Hard to know.

The other thing I learned this morning is that normally the seventh child after six born of the same sex is the one that turns into a werewolf. Now this explains why our housekeeper's mom stopped at six daughters. Fear of the wolf! Oh, all right, some other legends have it as the eighth kid or the seventh boy after a full moon or something like that. 

Also here in Brazil these fuzzers come out on Friday nights, not just full moon nights. This is a problem for me as we are always heading out to the country house on Friday nights. Seriously, do I need to think about this from now on? 

Sources here (in Portuguese):

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobisomem

http://portal-dos-mitos.blogspot.com.br/2013/02/lobisomem.html

Everyday Crazy - Ribeirão Preto

Everyday Crazy and toucan in a bag

As everyone knows, when you marry a person, you also marry their family. BH’s family is of Italian (and a small part Portuguese) descent, and more than a little bit crazy. And I say crazy in the American sense—wacky, funny, different, interesting—not the Brazilian sense which I have learned is quite a bit more serious and can in fact insult the person you have lightly called “crazy”.  

My MIL does not consider “crazy” an insult: she knows and embraces being “Everyday Crazy”—not psycho, not certifiable but just crazy. This blog does not have enough space to contain the wackiness is the entire Brazilian clan. But let me tell you that the vast majority of crazy-wonderful comes from my Brazilian mother-in-law or BMIL.  In all seriousness, there should be a book written about her.

In brief, she is the daughter of a small town doctor (the small town is important only to the history of how animals are part of life here. He often received farmyard animals like pigs as payment). She went on to study biology and then to teach it at one of the best universities in Brazil. Until “retiring” a few years ago, she taught aspiring teachers how to teach biology. And I say “retiring” because she has officially retired but works as hard or harder than she ever did.  She loves what she does and that is to be envied.

Or feared. One of the first weekends I spent at their small farm outside of Ribeirão Preto, she found and grabbed a large fuzzy spider and held it up in front of me to tell me about it. I have few fears in life: spiders figure large in one of them. Since BH and I were not married yet, I had to hold my ground and pretend I was not screaming inside.  

Spider nest at our house in São Paulo. I did not kill them though I wanted to

She has saved armadillos from the soup pot of the ranch manager by trading equal weight of meat for the little armored beast. When she brought the armadillo back home for a night until having time to release it in the campus park, it escaped and she called the firemen to get it out. She pretended that she had no idea what kind of animal was digging up her yard so they did it for free and all the time thinking they were saving some helpless lady from a big scary beast. Ha.

A twin with a stick insect

After the kids were born, she became one of their sources for all things creepy crawly. They catch grasshoppers, spiders, beetles, whatever, and show her and she tells them about what they eat or how they kill other mini-beasts or whatever. She once grabbed an ant and put in on a twin’s finger to show something and that ant had a bite like a shark. It literally tore a piece off the kid’s finger, and after the crying was done, she explained its defense mode.

BMIL has caught armadeira spiders, one of Brazil’s most venomous, and kept them in a pot until the kids come for the weekend and shows them. One day she had a pot full of small live scorpions that she proceeded to demonstrate to the kids—look, the tail has a stinger, these are killers, etc. When she wandered off for a minute, I told the kids that the only thing they needed to know was RUN! If you see a scorpion, RUN! The same for the coral snake she showed them last year—yes, it’s cool, it’s beautiful, now RUN! Why do they love Instituto Butantan, the spider and snake and scorpion museum? Because of their grandma.  

Scorpion at Butantan. Because now they like them.

This weekend however, Everyday Crazy took out a new chapter. Sitting at the breakfast table, she says to the kids….”okay, who wants to see the frozen toucan?” And I think, hmmm, that’s a new dessert. But no, she really means a frozen toucan. Apparently a toucan had been electrocuted on one of the farm’s electric wires, and my MIL had scooped it up, wrapped it up in plastic bags and stuck it in the freezer so she could show it to the twins the following week.

I admit that the frozen toucan was amazing. The colors of its beak had not dulled in the freezer—the beak stuck out of the bag  and it almost looked fake. Further unwrapping showed black feathers still shiny with life…and frost.  And there it was, for my children’s delight: a frozen perfect toucan.  Any bird museum would have been happy to have the specimen.

 

Five minutes later, the kids were back outside when two toucans flew over and chased four green parakeets out of their nests, probably to kill and eat the babies they had left behind. My kids have no romanticism about the chain of life, but they went from oohing and aaahing about the frozen toucan to yelling at them “get out of there, you big bozos!” 

Photo credit to one of the twins

I give a lot of the credit about the curiosity and interest of my kids in animals and insects to my BMIL. She has taught them to love nature, even the bad guys of nature. She does not scream and shudder when the black fuzzy spider comes near (okay, I no longer scream and have once even saved a spider from a watery death, but the shudders are involuntary).  She lets a line of sugar ants crawl up the wall in the kitchen, pretending not to see when BFIL kills them with his palm when she turns her back.

The term Everyday Crazy is a compliment. Somewhat synonymous with a toucan in the freezer.

Evening companion - Joanópolis

Here's the little friend who lives in the roof of the Casa do Alemão, our country house in Joanópolis. He and his wife that is. Once a day, or perhaps twice, he and his sweetie fly out to eat and stretch their wings, and then they sit for a while in the palm tree loudly calling to each other.  A short while later they fly back inside the roof and we don't see them again for a day.

Colorado gets jealous - Campinas

São Paulo to Ribeirão Preto by car. 5:15 pm.

Only Colorado competes...