send() attempts to hit a _uuid table

I'm a couch newbie, so forgive if a stupid question.

With a simple program that just does a save() of a simple document, couchrest seems to want to get data from a non-existant _uuid database, or that's how I'm interpreting the couchdb log and my reading of the couchrest code (although my read wasn't thorough, and I'm not a ruby programmer by any stretch of the imagination....)

Why does it do this? can I stop it? Should I do something to pre-fill the uuid db? is that another magic CouchDB thing, the uuid db?