Hoolock Gibbon looked down from a top branch of a fig tree that was his favourite haunt in a forest in Thailand. To his delight, he saw a few noisy lorikeets perched on the lower branches. They seemed to be having an exciting discussion.
Gibbon swung from branch to branch with his long, strong arms. Soon, he was hanging from the branch where the little birds sat. He moved quietly towards them and said “Boo” softly. The birds squealed in fright.
“Don’t ever do that to us, Mr. Gibbon!” said one of the lorikeets. “Our emerald green feathers will fall off because of the stress you cause us.”
Gibbon edged closer to the birds to listen in.
“As I was saying, I had a strange dream this morning. The sky was green and the grass blue,” said another lorikeet with a puzzled look on his face.
A third lorikeet preened his feathers with his orange bill. He looked up, nodded wisely and said, “Yes, the sky is green and the grass is blue. It was no dream as I too see it every morning.”
Gibbon heard this with astonishment. Then he laughed so much that the branch he was hanging from shook violently.
“You are funny and nutty. I think you eat far too many nuts,” he joked.
By then, a large flock of lorikeet parrots, each only about five-inch long and with blue feathers on its head, surrounded the ape. They were ready to quarrel with him.
“You are a big ape. You are a fruit cake because you eat far too many fruits! By the way, the sky is green and the grass is blue,” they cried in chorus.
Gibbon thought that something was terribly wrong. He called in the Hoppers right away to solve this mystery. With haste, the detectives came into the forest with a hop, skip and jump.
Curiouser and curiouserRock and his friends had never seen such birds before.
“What are lorikeets?” asked Rana of the ape that had come down from the tree top.
Let-it-be quickly googled information on parrots.
He read aloud, “There are three families in the Order of parrots. What is common to them is the short, curved beak and their four-toed feet, with two toes pointing forward and two backwards. Their unique feet help them to hang from branches or climb trees. Macaws, parakeets and parrots belong to one family, lorikeet to the second and cockatoo to the third. While macaw is the largest, the lorikeet is the smallest.” The grasshopper stopped reading and looked keenly at the images of lorikeets on his iPad.
“I didn’t ask you,” retorted the frog, “don’t think you are too smart.”
Let-it-be ignored Rana’s angry words.
“Hey Rock, look at this picture. Doesn’t this look exactly like the parrots up there? They are called vernal hanging parrots.”
The penguin nodded in agreement. “Yes, they do,” he confirmed after looking closely at the birds and the picture on the screen. “It says here that they sleep hanging upside down.”
Gibbon leaped up in excitement. He raised both arms above his head and danced.
“Eureka!” he shouted, “I have solved the mystery. Those dumb birds would have opened their eyes when they were hanging upside down. To them the earth seemed blue ‘below’ their feet and the sky green ‘above’ their heads.”
The birds were even more confused. They continued their discussion among themselves and concluded that the sky was sometimes blue and other times green.
Rana was furious. “Don’t ever call us to solve such silly mysteries,” he croaked.
“Let it be, let it be,” hummed the grasshopper, as the detectives hopped away to solve yet another mystery.
