Lyrical: Chemo Birds (Apheresis Birds)

Clear-Bellied Crud Sucker

Onithologists debate whether the Clear-Bellied Crud Sucker is smallest member of the Greater Shopvacs, or in fact the largest of the Lesser Suckers.

Your Blogger classifies the Crud Sucker as the smallest and perhaps the most adorable of Shopvacs.

Even as the Emu is more Ostrich than Kiwi, the Clear-Bellied Crud Sucker, with its indirect method of feeding, clearly has more in common with Greater Shopvacs (such as the flamboyant Orange Ridgid or Sears' Wet Dry) rather than the Lesser Suckers such as the Common Dustbuster or the Showy Dyson.

The Clear-Bellied Crud Sucker perches on the end of vacuum lines in almost any urban habit that has vacuum lines.

Unlike the Greater Shopvacs, however, the Crud Sucker does not generate its own suction. Rather it relies on connecting its tail to the vacuum line, creating low pressure in its large polycarbonate belly.

The Crud Sucker is able to pull in great quanties of crud--up to 1100 milliliters in some varieties--without having its intake blown directly to excretion.


In many ways the Clear Bellied Crud-Sucker is like the carrion birds, feeding on the cast offs and leftovers in its habitat. Having no beak, it feeds through a long, flexible, tube-like proboscis.

Sublingual Sap Sucker / Dental Shopvac (not pictured)

While not found in hospital habitats, the Sublingual Sap Sucker is found in dentists offices, and easily identified from its graceful, swan's neck (Latin: saliva ejector), its rasping calls, and insatiable thirst.

Red Blooded Spinner

The Red Blooded Spinner, a member of the Centrifuge family, builds a small rotating nest inside a much larger, more elaborate outer nest.

Like all Centrifuges, it bears no more resemblance to its wild cousins than the domestic chicken does to any wild bird.  As with the Uranium Centrifugue, private ownership is illegal, except in Iran and North Korea.

Unable to feed itself since its domestication during the dawn of Agriculture (8000 BCE), for hundreds of generations it has been utterly reliant on the Apheresis Technician to connect its feeding lines to its preferred food source, stem cell donors.