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That sounds totally gross, not something I want to think about when using red food coloring. Learn something new every day.
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It's called Cochineal, an insect of tropical America, that was a major export from Spanish America for textile dyes. It's been mostly replaced in foods by artificial coloring, but because of health issues, more and more food producers are going back to bug-based cochineal coloring.
No matter how gross it sounds, it's better than having your ADD kids bouncing off the walls from artificial coloring.
And in case some of you are debating whether to avoid red colored foods in the future, I should note that the Cochineal bug is also responsible for the color of many purple colored candies and foods.
And in case some of you are debating whether to avoid red colored foods in the future, I should note that the Cochineal bug is also responsible for the color of many purple colored candies and foods.
I would eat a whole bowlful of bugs, rather than a single drop of an artificial food coloring chemical created in a laboratory..
Not sure if I am wording this right, but I read/heard somewhere if a bird breaks it's wing, it can breathe through it's broken wing.
A buzzard, turkey vulture, vomits as a defense mechanism. Try to imagine that stench!
My old college roommate must have had the same defense mechanism. Does the turkey vulture typically drink too much jager before pulling this one out of the old toolbox?
The Indigo Bunting, a common North American songbird, appears a brilliant blue in daylight, but has no blue pigment in its plumage. The blue color comes instead from microscopic structures in the feathers that refract and reflect blue light, much like the airborne particles that cause the sky to look blue. If you hold a "blue" indigo bunting feather up with a light source behind it, the light coming through will appear brown.
The Chestnut-backed Chickadee is the only American bird whose name cannot be spelled with the tiles in a Scrabble box. There are four Cs and two Ks, so three blanks would be required.
Remember the nonsense word "axolotl", from Mad Magazine?
Well, the Axolotl is actually an unusual salamander from Mexico, with the X pronounced like SH. Unusual because the amphibian species never "matures" to an adult terrestrial form, and remains waterborne with breathing gills all its life. It aroused scientific curiosity because it can regenerate amputated legs. It is nearly extinct, due to the urbanization of its habitat around Mexico City.
There is a lovely 20-mile stretch of highway in southwestern New Mexico that is very popular with birdwatchers, affording nice views of habitat with surprising numbers and varieties of grassland and prairie birds. It has been often described in birdwatching journals, and is called, curiously, the Nutt-Hatch road. Not because Nuthatches are so often seen there (they're not, they prefer wooded habitat), but because Route 28 connects the towns of Nutt, NM, and Hatch, NM.
Most maps no longer show the road-junction community of Nutt -- MapQuest shows it, but not Google Maps. The only building there is signed as Nutt's Corner Bar.
I have a deflating theory that the birding is no better on the Nutt-Hatch road than it is anywhere else in that part of New Mexico, but some birders had their curiosity piqued, enjoyed a day of productive birding, told others about it, and now people who pass along that road (or make a special trip there, as I did) drive more attentive to the bird life, and simply see more because they are looking.
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