Rare Sightings

Two days ago, I saw a young grackle following a matured male around, who didn't seem to mind the younger bird doing so. I kept watch for a bit, since this is unusual behavior. The young are always taken care of by the females, though I wondered if the male was taking up that role anyway. There are rare occasions that male grackles will care for the young, but I had never witnessed it. So I continued watching to see what was going on, this went on for about 3 minutes that I watched the two birds. Everywhere the male went, the young bird would follow. Then, the male stopped and picked something up, which of course was food that it had found. The younger bird reacted the same way it would if its mother was about to feed it. She opened her mouth and fluttered her wings, chirping for food. Even then, I wondered if she might have just left her mother's wing and was attempting beg for food from another bird.

This wasn't the case, the male wasted no time in bringing the food over to the younger bird and putting it into her mouth. He waited till she was done shallowing, making sure she didn't drop any of it before moving on, which she continued to follow. To explain the previous statement, often times the young will drop their food and for whatever reason, will not pick it up for themselves. (Well that depends on age.) The mother will always wait and pick it back up for them, repeating this process however many times it takes. I've seen up to 2 times a younger bird has dropped their food. On both times I saw that, the third time the food is dropped,  the mother will take a higher angle to be sure the food goes down.

It was definitely nifty seeing this male grackle taking on the role of caretaker. I saw them again about 30 minutes later. Heard some chirping and when I looked over, he was feeding her again.

DT3 Stuff
All of the Chapter 8 content is finished as of yesterday. Overall, it's easily my favorite of the Gate chapters, and I really like how it turned out. All of the changes I set out to make are also in the game. I'll be doing a full playthrough of the playable content and going through the bug list that grew as Chapter 8 went on. There are only 4 bugs left on the list which started with 23. Of course during my playthrough so far, I've found a few minor errors as well.

Of the changes, the stun time change mentioned in an earlier post has been fully implemented and is working nicely. The Gate 2 overworld now has a menu save feature, and saving has been disabled from the encounters. So far the stun change hasn't upset the balance, just made things a bit easier to stun lock, which is fine, as that's the idea. (Though most enemies don't last but 2-3 hits in DT3 anyway.) A few minor level edits have been made. A Podobo was actually removed from Gate A. There were a million in that place anyway, one had to go.