The genome for this pretty bird, native to Cuba, has just been sequenced, helping to answer some questions about its place in the web of life. Pigeons and doves are fantastically widespread, not least because they can be very strong flyers. They appear throughout the world, almost everywhere but the Arctic and Antarctica. It was thought that this species was related to other doves in the Caribbean region, and other evidence suggested it might be related to Australasian birds.
The new genomic data says neither, that the blue-headed quail dove is an ancient lineage (older than chimpanzees), as distinct as the dodo – and at risk of the same fate. It hasn’t been well studied in part because there are few mature individuals left, and trends in hunting, predators, and habitat loss bode ill for the remaining birds.
In 2021, we got a pair of kittens from a rescue organization. One of them, Grace, was sheer easy mode. Cute, low maintenance, gentle with her claws and teeth, not a big lap cat, but that’s ok. The other, Horatio, was very sweet and cuddly, a fluffy little orange boy who was underweight for age and ended up being sick all the time – we were at the vet almost weekly for a while there, with a constellation of symptoms from runny nose to listlessness to stumbling. And the vet finally said, “I think we should check bile acids.”
Grace and Horatio shortly after their arrival in our home.
Bile acids aid in digestion, and they are, in essence, recycled by the liver as it processes what comes out of the gastrointestinal tract. A portosystemic shunt (liver shunt) is an extra blood vessel (in the simple case) that routes blood around the liver, so the liver doesn’t get a chance to do its many jobs, including metabolism, storing nutrients, and filtering out toxic material. Testing for levels of bile acids before and after a meal is a clever way of seeing whether the blood is flowing into the liver correctly. If it is, acids secreted in response to the meal will be promptly recycled. If not, they just keep floating around, hinting that other stuff is building up in the blood. A particularly dangerous example is ammonia compounds, a natural by-product of protein digestion that, if not filtered out, can cause terrible symptoms – lethargy, vomiting, disorientation.
Liver shunt is a developmental defect – the vessels just didn’t get built right – and while these symptoms can be managed somewhat with diet and medication, the outlook is poor. In the right cases (simple, with one big vessel, rather than complex, with a lot of little ones) surgery offers a chance at a normal life. The detouring vein is fitted with a ring containing absorbent material that, over time, slowly narrows the errant vessel, and the blood follows the path of least resistance right into the liver, as intended. We scheduled the bile acids test, and the results were clear, later confirmed with an abdominal ultrasound. The ultrasound yielded a ray of hope: there seemed to be just one big vessel, making him a good candidate for surgery.
The stomach (not shown) nestles under the liver, with a blood supply right into it (lower blue vessel). Blood moves around inside the liver and comes out, filtered, above it (left). Horatio had an extra vessel that popped up and around (right). A lot of blood was still being filtered – so his liver was working well enough to help him grow – but it wasn’t enough to keep him healthy.
We were fortunate that Horatio was diagnosed before receiving any kind of surgery. The liver processes medications, too. Some pets are discovered to have this defect only after they fail to recover from a routine spay or neuter because their livers couldn’t clear the anesthetics they received. And Horatio was lucky that we were easily able to manage his special diet and medication to keep him healthy and growing while we waited for a surgery that we were fortunate we could afford. He was very lucky to have a single vessel, an easy target for the surgeons. And we were lucky that he was a perfect little gentleman in the car when we drove him two hours to the hospital at the University of Pennsylvania’s Veterinary School, where our regular veterinarian referred him so he could be treated by specialists who had actually done this surgery before.
Horatio was a perfect passenger on the way to the veterinary hospital.
We had a few hiccups getting him onto the surgery schedule, but when the day came, everything went as well as could be hoped. The only real surprise seemed to be that he needed a relatively large ring – a size usually needed only for dogs. We found this charming, because we joke that he’s our little golden retriever: friendly, unflappable, and in love with his tennis ball. The surgery protocol called for a 3-day stay, but after the first day or so, that’s often just to ensure that the animal is getting an appetite back, and Horatio bounced back more or less right away. They invited us to pick him up early, saying, “We’re just sitting around watching him eat!” We got him home, and our other cats accepted him back almost right away (our third cat didn’t love his cone at first but got over it). His incision healed promptly, and his first follow-up bile acids test was normal.
All of that is wonderful, but that’s not the marvel.
Most cats – more than half – have some form of yellow eyes, about 4 times as many as have green eyes. The color reflects how much melanin is in the cat’s eyes, with blue being none – just showing the light scatter through the eye.
Copper eyes in healthy cats are caused by lots of melanin, which is rare in the eyes of the general cat population. So when it seemed liked most of the cats showing up with liver shunt had copper-colored eyes, veterinarians made a note of it. Some even made the tantalizing suggestion that eye color had been reported to change after surgery, but I could never find before-and-after pictures.
Copper or orange is not just a normal (if rare) eye color for cats, it is also part of the standard for some pedigreed cats, but it’s not known why it’s common in cats with liver shunt. In most of these cats, another buildup, related to the interruption in the liver’s function, is likely to blame. Whatever the reason, Horatio had very arresting, deep, copper-colored eyes. Before surgery.
5 months old
6 months old
9 months old
It took a few months, but his eyes did start to lighten, and by about 7 months after surgery (during which he was weaned off his special diet and medications with no ill effects), they were yellow.
3 months after surgery
8 months after surgery
11 months after surgery
Seeing him now, playing chase with the other cats, hanging out in the back yard and watching the birds, being a cute lap cat, it’s hard to believe he was ever so frail and sick. And while his coppery eyes were gorgeous, we are more than happy to see this clear evidence, every day, that the surgery worked.
Horatio has grown to be a handsome adult of 9 to 10 lb, bright and curious and healthy.
Would you like to use photos of Horatio’s eye-color change? Send me an email and let’s talk!
This is a substantial revision of an article originally posted in 2023.
Most children, Asher Svidensky says, are a little intimidated by golden eagles. Kazakh boys in western Mongolia start learning how to use the huge birds to hunt for foxes and hares at the age of 13, when the eagles sit heavily on their undeveloped arms. Svidensky, a photographer and travel writer, shot five boys learning the skill as well as the girl, Ashol-Pan. “To see her with the eagle was amazing,” he recalls. “She was a lot more comfortable with it, a lot more powerful with it and a lot more at ease with it.”
The Kazakhs of the Altai mountain range in western Mongolia are the only people that hunt with golden eagles, and today there are around 400 practising falconers. Ashol-Pan, the daughter of a particularly celebrated hunter, may well be the country’s only apprentice huntress. —A 13-year-old eagle huntress in Mongolia
I am going out on a limb and guessing she is not the only daughter of an accomplished eagle hunter. It’s a great thing when dads share their interests and explorations of the world with their daughters just as they would with sons, and I hope she is not actually alone. Or if so, then not for long.
