“Wow after just a few years of birding I feel like I can now identify some birds based on just their general shape and movement; I wonder if birders have a specific term for that. I should look it up”
I love photos of baby albatrosses because in spirit they look like photos of easygoing toddlers who are just waiting for their parents to hand them a toy or a treat after they finish loading groceries into the car
during a trip to Arizona last year I encountered an intriguing mystery…
On the left is a big, toxic darkling beetle in the genus Eleodes. Abundant in the southwest, their quinone-based defensive secretions protect them from most predators (just smelling one made my sinuses burn painfully).
On the right is some sort of large animal droppings containing many Eleodes shells. I couldn’t imagine what sort of animal would eat them and produce such large droppings. I theorized that it was a pellet coughed up by a large bird like an owl or roadrunner, but couldn’t find any info to suggest anything like that is resistant to the beetle toxins.
I still had no idea what was behind these droppings for many months after the trip, but I finally realized the culprit, a beast that I had been lucky enough to encounter while I was there:
It was the the Sonoran desert toad, Inciliusalvarius. One of the world’s largest toads, it is apparently immune to the secretions of the darkling beetles in its desert habitat and eats them as a large portion of its diet.
It’s also the toad species known for the powerful psychedelic properties of its skin secretions (though contrary to popular belief, licking the toad is ineffective and extremely dangerous. Consuming the raw toad toxin can easily kill you.) Furthermore, there’s anecdotal evidence that the toads actually require darkling beetles to manufacture their toxin, which makes sense as smaller american toads have been reported to require similarly toxic carabid beetles for the same reason.
TL;DR I found some weird poop with beetles in it and was too dumb to realize until later that it came from the giant drug toads
As part of the long Beach Island Foundation’s ComX art exhibition, the artists were invited to submit artwork for a free coloring book. Here are my pages that tell the story “Little Help”.
The anhinga (Anhinga anhinga) , sometimes called snakebird, darter, American darter, or water turkey, is a water bird of the warmer parts of the Americas. The word anhinga comes from the Brazilian Tupi languageand means devil bird or snake bird. The origin of the name snakebird is apparent when swimming: only the colored neck appears above water so the bird looks like a snake ready to strike. They do not have external nares (nostrils) and breathe solely through their epiglottis. Like other darters, the anhinga hunts by spearing fish and other small prey using its sharp, slender beak.
Cheese temples are an abundant, frequently excavated type of Neolithic archaeological site. The rat’s priesthood was clearly far reaching and embraced by millions of devotees (as a protector of children, gamblers, and harvests), and yet effigies of the rat himself are surprisingly rare— whether in the form of priest’s anthropomorphic costumes, or automatons. Recent findings, such as the unrecognizably dismantled automaton in Fig. 1, and a rare depiction of the destruction process in Fig. 2, have indicated that Chucky Cheese’s effigies were almost universally deliberately destroyed.
Fig. 1
While human remains and burial grounds are not typically discovered within or nearby excavated cheese temples, the ritualized destruction of Chucky Cheese’s effigies closely mirrors burial practices in which the skull is broken.
Fig. 2
In the authors’ opinions, this may indicate that the rat’s priesthood symbolically continued to bury their god as they once buried men.
you have spent years investigating the ancient, dusty texts of those who came before you. it wasn’t hard or anything, it’s just that the system was never updated so you had to do it all by hand, and that takes forever. but finally, finally, you have found it… the name of the great and evil menace you wish to summon.
you begin the incantation. you chant the name three times: nycticorax! nycticorax! nycticorax!
and in a puff of smoke…
image: the black-crowned night heron, a small black, gray, and white wading bird with long legs, big feet, and a penchant for tucking its neck all the way into its body so that it becomes a single orb of bird, as shown. latin name: nycticorax nycticorax, subspeciesnycticorax.
it looks up at you.
it squawks.
you are not sure where you went wrong.
(on the other hand, ornithology has a higher survival rate than urban fantasy sorcery, so maybe this is better.)
I went outside this morning to put some trash in the trash can which was out on the curb, and the people across the street had opted to put their garbage out in just this single-layer plastic bag. I’m not sure why they thought this was a good idea, but a big gorgeous seagull also thought it was a good idea and was starting to tear into the bottom of the bag to get something to eat. I ran back inside for the camera, and when I got back there were two gulls and a squabble ensued for this Giant Slab of Pizza. One gull emerged victorious and paraded off with its pizza slab to the lawn next door, where it (with some difficulty) ate the pizza slab. The gull who didn’t get the pizza slab continued ripping open the garbage bag for other bounty. I cannot express how delighted I was to witness these events.
Maybe like ten or fifteen minutes later I leaned out the door to see if they were still there. They were not, but someone was outside cleaning up the strewn around trash, and it was at this point that I realized I was probably supposed to have……..chased the gulls away? To prevent them from making a mess? Can you imagine! The gulls are hunger, ingenuity, and chaos, and I love and support them.
you’re told Jeremy Irons lives here, you’re waiting to bump into him eventually, down one of these long slanting hallways, listening for footsteps elsewhere in the house—but doesn’t he have money? why would he have isolated himself on this rock with these fucking pelicans? all day and all night they flap their wings on the roof and open their gullets to bring forth a low baritone, “Nobody Knows The Trouble I See”, none of them in tune with each other, the song stopping and starting and playing over itself as they get going. you haven’t slept in weeks because when you lie down it’s nothing but the feeling of concrete sliding into the sea and the din of those smug fucking pelicans waiting for you to wake up already drowning. why the fuck did you believe them when they said Jeremy Irons lived here?
This morning I watched a blue heron fly majestically into the pond across the street, only to be immediately shown by an irate goose that pecking order is not necessarily proportional to wingspan.
Miller, Greig and their collaborators fed the first wave of that data into algorithms to condense a web of relationships into a simple rank. That rank not only reflects the relationship of frequent combatant pairs such as the house sparrow and the blue jay, but also accurately predicts which bird will dominate when two distant species meet for the first time.
oh my god yes this is good. get a bunch of little old ladies who love to sit and watch the bird feeder to send in their observations any time the birds scuffle and use those absolute REAMS of data to literally make a Bird Tier List. this rules. they even found some rock-paper-scissors setups between specific bird species…
Is there any plan to do this for mammals? This morning in our yard we saw a woodchuck retreat from a rabbit, who was then in turn chased off by an angry chipmunk.
Here’s the bird tier list, by the way:
ALT
with an image ID, too, because I like typing bird names
Couple of weeks ago, I was asked to giving a tour of Ridgefield WLR to a bunch of Girl Scout Brownies, unfortunately I said yes (my Businesses partner’s wife is the Scout leader). Well there were 15 little girls, 3 vans and 5 adults. One parent in each van and a fellow birder. There was this one precocious little girl about 5 years old, she wasn’t old enough for the troop but one of the parents brought her along. As I was going thru the WLR (its a drive thru WLR), I showed them an albino Nutria that lives in the park (this becomes important later). I pointed out the Great Blue Heron, talked about its habits, like any tour, about a third was interested, and two thirds was bored. Well this girl just kept asking questions about the bird and I kept asking, next we saw an egret, and again I went thru my spiel was saying that they were in the same family as the Heron, and suddenly the little girl put 2+2 together and of course came up with a great answer, it was an Albino Heron. Well next we saw a couple of Sandhill cranes, I mentioned that they are migrants and were different from the Heron and Egret in that they were more a vegetarian bird. Again the little girl added 2+2 and said that they were like Aunt Judy, they were immigrants and they were vegetarian, to which her mother corrected her and said Judy was Vegan in that she didn’t eat meat or meat byproducts. So to simplify life I propose new names for the following birds.
My grandmother died last year. Last week, I mentioned her in passing and an acquaintance said they were sorry. That seemed odd to me. I don’t know how to respond to a thing like that. Eventually I said what my dad learned to say — ‘it was sudden, but not unexpected.’ She was sick for years. Some of those years were alright, even, and I don’t think there’s a better way for a thing to happen than that. Sudden and unexpected is bad; slow and unexpected is worse. Slow and expected isn’t worth talking about. Fast and foreseen is called graceful. I wish everything went down like that.
b) I found the paper they’re citing and it’s actually really sweet and a really cool study to read! not at all too dense
some highlights:
this is VERY sweet
(this paper came about bc they were having trouble identifying participants by ‘traditional’ recruitment methods like posting flyers and contacting LGBT networks/support groups, and also didn’t want to skew the data toward people who would frequent these)
they also tried making profiles on dating sites but…..
![garadinervi:John Bevis – Erica Van Horn, [Bird Names / Bird-Name Shorthand], Coracle, Clonmel, Tippe](https://64.media.tumblr.com/d85ea371716337204a9fe309fdaee0c1/197af4288f871a7d-0a/s1280x1920/bef06cb6783cd0630b0d3be7dc14114839800d8b.jpg "garadinervi:John Bevis – Erica Van Horn, [Bird Names / Bird-Name Shorthand], Coracle, Clonmel, Tippe")
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