I would like to take care of...
SASKIA
Username: Tenni
Kennel Number: 175 ( A great number:3)
Name [of pet]: Saskia
Gender [of pet]: Female
Breed/Species [of pet]: Honey Creeper
Use [for pet]:
This pet is adorable!!! I will give this pet the role of a main character in my character page. I considered Furona, but I believe that it has more potential as a character. I will never trade her or replace her with another character, for she is special and amazing in her own little quiet way. Little Saskia will NEVER collect dust and will always have new art and stories of and about her coming in and being written. I love everything about her and she has given me so much inspiration. I only have 3 character including her so far so she will get a lot of attention<33 I have high hopes for her if I am lucky enough to recieve the honor of taking care of her.
Personality [of pet]:
Sweet
Kind
Loyal
Loving
Shy
Ignored
Judged
Judging
Regretful
Delicate
Grudging
Lingering
Contained
Thoughtful
Often Silent
Cheerful
Beautiful
Musical
Melancholy
Exotic
Warm
Chatty when with friends
Quirky
Fun
Artistic
Gullible
Sillyd
Snarky at times
Impatient
Loves being pai attention to
Prideful
Truthful
Honest
Clever
Avid learner
True architect
Shrewd
Sometimes sarcastic when irritated
Curious
Disobediant
Imaginative
Background/History [of pet]:
I was falling. Fast. My feathers ruffled in the harsh wind and a feeling of dread washed over me. Being only a small bird, the tragedy of me falling out of my nest was fatal. Mother bird always told me to stop peering over the nest's edge,but being a curious bird I always disobeyed. Today my mother had left the nest to go forage and get some more food for me and my siblings. While she was gone, I crept over to the edge of our nest and looked out at the world that I had only begun to call home. I suppose that I may have leaned over to far this time, for before I knew it I was hurtling towards the earth at a surprisingly fast rate.I knew it in my tiny heart that I would probably not make it. A few feet off the ground however, my untimely death was stopped by my surprising landing on a warthog's hairy back.
I bounced off his back and landed on the cold ground. The warthog was very big and mother always told me to be wary of strangers, so I began to back away, but tripped when I attempted to stand up. I tried again and again to rise, but each time I found myself on the ground again. The warthog noticing my desperate struggles came over to me. "Why hello little one." he said in a kind voice. "You seem to have trouble arising.... I believe that you may have a broken or sprained leg. It is a miracle that you did not die. That was quite the fall you just took." He replied staring down at me kindly. The warthog seemed friendly enough, but I was still wary. "Is there any way that you get me back to me nest sir?" I asked timidly. "No need to call me sir". the warthog replied with a chuckle. "You may call me Mooshoo. What is your name?" he questioned. "Saskia" I replied. "Well Saskia," the wart hog began. " I am afraid that I cannot assist you in returning to your nest" he replied in a sadder tone. "Why not??!!" I replied indignant. "Look up Saskia." Mooshoo began. "Do you see how tell that tree is?" I nodded and Mooshoo continued. " The top of the tree is where your nest is. You're nest is so high up that I cannot reach it and therefore cannot deliver you back into your home." My heart sank and I averted my eyes from Mooshoo's kind face. "Then I will be on the ground forever?" I asked. "You are a bird arn't you? You can fly." Mooshoo pointed out. My heart leapt with possibility. "Do not get too excited young one." Mooshoo said. "You still have a broken leg and must heal before even attempting to fly. You may stay with me and I will see what we can do to help heal your leg." Mooshoo brought Saskia back to his home and they became the best of friends and were inseperable.
Saskia learned how to fly, but by the time it took her to learn she knew that all her family would have left the tree and all her siblings have learned to fly. Her feelings that she felt were a bit sad, but the more she was around Mooshoo the more he felt like her family and the less she missed her own. They were still her family, but Mooshoo she knew and cared about deeply. They were almost as one. Mooshoo and Saskia. Saskia and Mooshoo. Wherever Mooshoo went, you could be sure to see Saskia either perched on his head or flying above him. They lived only a small distance from Saskia's old home. A part of the Amazon Rain Forest that was not usually known to creatures. In the hollowed out tree trunk was where Mooshoo slept and when Saskia's leg healed she slept just above him in the tree's vast canopy in a nest that she had constructed herself. Mooshoo would go off often and scavenge for roots, while Saskia stayed home and found her own food. One day much like any other, Saskia woke up to the sound of Mooshoo leaving the tree. He called up to her Canopy. "Saskia!! I'm going off to get some food! Be back soon". Saskia was not worried in the least and busied herself with building a new nest, flying or whatever she was so inclined to do. Her heart was carefree and she was happy. Twilight came on though, and Mooshoo still had not returned from home. Saskia began to grow worried for his sake. He had never searched for food this long and always returned around mid-day. Saskie waited another 20 minutes and finally decided on the resolution that she should go looking for him.
Calling out for Mooshoo Saskia traveled the forest looking very carefully for a light brown wart hog, but she did not find even the slightest glimpse of him. Feeling defeated, Saskia returned home and crawled into her nest to try sleep.
In the morning Saskia awoke and began her search again for Mooshoo, but once again she came home dissapointed, cold and alone.Saskia woke in the morning the third day, but this time found Mooshoo in his bed with a huge gash in his shoulder. It looked infected. Saskia rushed to Mooshoo and felt his forehead with her small wing. He was burning up with fever.
Saskia rushed to the stream nearby their home and wet a big banana leaf. She rushed home and laid the banana leaf on Mooshoo's hot forehead. She repeated this process numerous times until his temperature had dropped noticeably. Then Saskia took care of his wound. She knew that their was an aloe plant somewhere in this forest and she intended to find it. Mother bird has told her that aloe will help heal wounds. After flying quite the distsance, Saskia found an aloe plant and took as many leaves as she could fit in her beak and traveled back to Mooshoo. Biting off the tip of the aloe plant, Saskia squeezed it's juice into Mooshoo's cut and saved the rest of the aloe plant for late doses. Many doses were givin to Mooshoo in the next hour and by night time his condition was quite improved. Saskia stayed up with Mooshoo all night, not daring to leave his side in case his condition got worse. His codition did not get worse however, it got better and by the next morning Mooshoo was able to eat the meager meal that Saskia gave him. Mooshoo's health improved and his wound healed so after about two weeks he was back to normal again and fully healed. Despite all Saskia's help in reviving him, Mooshoo never did tell her the details of what his accident had been and Saskia never inquired more then the one time. She was just glad to have her friend back. After Mooshoo's incident he was different. Moodier. Solum and grave. He also would not eat a thing and was very angry when Saskia tried to coax food into him. This attitude of his continued for many weeks until one day Saskia inquired if Mooshoo would like to go on a walk through the jungle like they used to do. Mooshoo bolted up right from his sitting position and glared at Saskia his eyes burning with hate. It was only then that Saskia realized that whatever had happened in the jungle had made her friend unwishing to be her friend and was different in so many ways. Blinking back tears Saskia gathered her few belongings and left the tree she had called home for such a long time, never to return. "Goodbye Mooshoo". Saskia whispered. Mooshoo only sneered back.
The forest was very big and Saskia was very small. She flew for days in the rainforest canopy searching for a new home that was not inhabited already. This task was much easier said then done and Saskia flew for quite the distance until she came about an extra large tree. In this tree's canopy's birds of all shapes and sizes were dancing, laughing and singing. On the lower part of the tree there was a hole which when Saskia peered in was filled with more birds and a great table filled with the best feast she had ever seen or dreamed of seeing. At the back of the room Saskia saw two birds perched on a gold branch watching the festvities looking amused. Around these birds there were 3 turkey vulchers which looked almost as though they were guarding the king and queen.
I realized that I was very cold and that the tree trunk was very warm. My belly grumbled. I was also so hungry. Cautiously I entered the tree trunk and crept over to the food table. I had never seen such delectable looking foods in my life! I helped myself to some nuts and berries and when I had finished that meal I was felling quite content and my belly was settled. I made my way through the throungs of people to the center of the tree and began to dance with the other birds swaying to the music that some birds in the corner were providing. This felt right. This felt good. She closed her small eyes and swayed to the music which was provided by some birds in the corner who were singing. All of a sudden she was tapped on the wing by a bird who looked surprisingly like herself.
The bird was her cousin and told Saskia about how she was actually of royal blood. That is why she never met her father and that is why she had the gold markings on her wings.
Other [Art, Likes, Dislikes, Mate, Age, Appearance, etc.]:
Likes: Saskia likes many things. Some of these things are:
Dancing, music, laughing, spending time with friends, flying, food, insects, small mammals, badgers, warthogs, rainbows, rain, summer, winter, lemonade, bird baths, cake!!, aspen leaves, the color lavender, magazines, her family, jade, ruby, all gems, dawn, twilight, the sunset, Colorado, mountains, fluff, penguins, vacations, traveling, warm climates, the rain forest, ocelots(the only cat that she likes),precious metals,fashion, being comfortable, eating, snowflakes, snow, ornaments, stars, the sky, nature, polka dots,slippers,tea, using her imagination,having knowledge, adventure, security, lights, space, mirrors, trees, the ocean, sea horses, pufferfish,chimes, outdoors fish (to eat as well as to look at),squirrels and paint.
Dislikes: Saskia has many dislikes as well:
Technology, alley ways, dark crampt spaces, closets, cats, shoes,emoticons,large animals(they frighten her), flashlights,grapes, onions,trombones, loud noises, the color black, green tea,indoors, Chinese dogs, Scorching heat, the desert, Texas, purses, mustaches, crude humor, puns, ribbons, stripes, ladybugs, animal abuse, winking, contacts, being cooped up, rules, not being able to have independence, light bulbs, artificial flavors, drugs, drug use, zoos, money, night time, sun glasses,violins,sarcasm(even though she sometimes does it herself) atlas's, big loud bells, cities,puzzles,cation tape, sky scrapes!!!,snow men, bow ties,fossils, skeletons,halloween, buttons,television, blood, knitting, yarn, knitting needles, needles in general, war, army's, planes(fake birds), red things, winning, diving and flying really fast through the sky, knives, guns, weapons, the color pink, poodles and when people she loves are angry with her.
Mate: No mate yet... o3o
Age:13 years old in human years
Appearance:Saskia is a petite, delicate bird with gripping yellow feet. She has a dark purple body with a lavender chest. Two golden aspen leaves dangle from her fan like tail. A small golden yellow beak is what she uses to eat her food and she has small golden dots decorating her body's frame. As for her wings the outside fringe is rimmed in gold. Two heart like swirls and patterns also adorn her body leaving her with an over all charming look.
Saskia's Photo Album:
By: StripeyOriginal ReferenceBy Metallic Dragon Honeycreeper:
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Passeriformes
Family: Thraupidae
Genus: Cyanerpes
Oberholser, 1899
The Honeycreeper:
Owe information to:http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/hawaiihoneycreepers.html
Of Hawaii's birds, the honeycreepers (Drepanidinae) are most famous, having put on what is arguably the world's most dazzling display of adaptive radiation--an explosion of species from a single unspecialized ancestor to at least 54 species that filled available niches in the islands' habitats. In fact, speciation in the Hawaiian honeycreepers dwarfs the famed radiation of Darwin's 14 Galapagos finches. Robert Fleischer, Cheryl Tarr, and Carl McIntosh at the National Zoo's Molecular Genetics Laboratory estimate that the honeycreepers' ancestor arrived three to four million years ago; others put the arrival farther back, at closer to seven million years ago. This ancestor--one colonizing species of finch, possibly a Eurasian rosefinch (Carpodacus sp.) or, less likely, the North American house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus)--started what proved to be an evolutionary snowball. "There must have been a lot of open niches, and the birds hit the islands and speciated very rapidly," says Fleischer, who studies the genetics of fossil and living Hawaiian birds. Rapidly, in terms of geologic time, is thought to be within the first 200,000 to 300,000 years after the first finch touch-down.
Nectar-feeding honeycreepers evolved dramatically curved bills designed for probing and extracting the nectar from the flowers of Hawaii's endemic lobelias and other plants. Insectivorous honeycreepers developed thin, warbler-like bills for picking insects from the foliage. Seed-eaters developed stouter, stronger bills for cracking tough husks. Some species probed or cracked bark with strong hooked bills seeking wood-boring insects, thereby filling a niche woodpeckers do elsewhere.
Honeycreepers shared the islands with an array of other unique bird species. In 1991, Storrs L. Olson and Helen F. James of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History described for the first time 32 extinct species they identified from bones found in lava tubes, sinkholes, dunes, and excavated Polynesian refuse piles (middens) on the main Hawaiian Islands over the past 19 years. Three others had been previously described. When their analyses are through, at least 20 more species will likely be added. These recent findings conjure up a vision of an almost mythical world where birds, not mammals, dominated. Large flightless waterfowl called moa nalos were the islands' large herbivores. A harrier, a hawk, an eagle, and four owls topped the food chain as predators. No mammals patrolled the ground (Hawaii's only native land mammal is a bat), and, with the need to fly gone, many of the castaway bird species, such as endemic ducks, ibis, and rails, lost their powers of flight.
But splendid isolation left Hawaii's flora and fauna ill-equipped to deal with the arrival of humans, and, as on most other isolated islands, endemic species quickly disappeared, or declined, once Homo sapiens hit the shores and wiped out flightless and ground-nesting species.
SunnyD 
