Tag: dorks

snailkites:

This month I’m in North Dakota banding Northern Saw-whet Owls.

1. 

The owls make this face the entire time you’re handling them. Plus a bit of bill-snapping.

2. That pink pigment, porphyrin, fluoresces under a blacklight. We use it to determine the age of the bird. A bird born in 2018 (a hatch-year, or HY) will have uniformly colored feathers. A bird born in 2017 (a second-year, or SY) molts the inner primaries and secondaries (the large flight feathers in the middle) in one solid block. This bird has an interesting pattern. We aged her as an After Second-year (ASY) because she has a mix of feather age classes.

3. Here’s her wing viewed from above in normal light. I’m looking through the flight feathers to see the molt limit. If you look closely, you can see some feathers are light brown and others are darker.

4. Here’s her band. Saw-whets have a lot of fluff all the way to the foot, so the band reveals the true size of her leg. Check out those talons!

We turn out the lights and let them readjust to darkness before release. Then it’s back to check the nets again.

Owl banding stations like this one, arranged in a network across the US and Canada, give us a sense of how the population is doing. NSWOs go through a boom-and-bust population cycle. So in some years, hundreds of birds are banded and most are HY, meaning the population structure is skewed towards juveniles. This year my station has only caught 10 birds, and only one of them has been a HY. Most are SY. What does that suggest about this population?

(OvO)

swan2swan:

I just realized that Han never knew that Luke got his hand chopped off while he was in carbonite and I don’t know which path I want to follow with this information:

1. Han seeing Luke’s injured hand after the sail barge battle and thinking that Luke has been a robot the whole time

2. Luke shaking his hand with a super-firm grip and Han just thinking “Wow this kid has gotten…absurdly strong.”

3. Luke just pulls off his hand one day and throws it at Han.

4. Luke picks up a spacechicken carcass and crushes it with his bare hand and Han is intimidated

5. Han says “It’s good to see you’re all right” and then Luke says “well, actually…” and pulls off his hand and Han falls over the back of his chair

6. Han says “It’s good to see you’re all right” and everyone gasps and Leia says “Too soon!” and Han is confused and they all just rag on him

7. Han needs a battery and Luke just opens up his hand and pulls out a battery and gives it to him and Han just stares

8. Luke reappears after a mission with all the synthflesh off and Han says “I thought it was easy but you LOST YOUR HAND?” and Luke just says “Oh, no, I lost this before Endor” and Han is hurt and betrayed.

9. Luke keeps making hand puns and limb puns and raising his right hand to high-five Han and Han just never gets it

10. Luke excitedly tells Han as they’re waiting to be taken to the Sarlacc because it’s been a whole year that he’s wanted to tell the guy. 

theothin:

stars-and-bites:

chasekip:

let them dance

Let them dance for mantine

this isn’t even the best part of this scene

she was telling them team skull members are banned from mantine surfing, because they keep trying to dance while surfing and falling off

not because they’re part of a group of pokemon thieves or anything, just because they’re that bad at surfing and people are tired of having to rescue them

Source: chasekip

wishyroses:

teashoesandhair:

goldenmeme:

catsuggest:

lord-kitschener:

instructionsfordancing:

artaeum:

lord-kitschener:

Obviously I want you to take care of your pets and make sure they get food and fresh water on a regular basis, but cats being huge drama queens and screaming hysterically at you and acting like they’re tragic famine victims who haven’t eaten in weeks and are about to drop dead from starvation right mcfuckin now, because you’re 10 minutes late feeding them is always going to be one of the funniest things to me

the cat who lives at the vet clinic i volunteer at was mad yesterday because his dinner was half an hour late due to a busy day. he proceeded to go to all the (empty dw) garbage cans and tried to knock them over and started desperately scavenging for scraps of food because obviously no one loves him or cares about him and if he must eat garbage to survive then so be it

not food related, but one time my cat cried at me for 20 minutes before i worked out that the reason why she was upset was because there was a coat hanger on her favourite cushion

This is absolutely beautiful and changed my life, thank you so much. Please protect her from hangers at all costs

wow. am STORVING and humaines here making joke laugh at cate honger ?!

My cat is a social eater who is not food motivated at all, so I was baffled when I first got him because he didn’t seem to care about food but he would SCREAM at me for hours when I knew his bowl was full. Any time I went to double check that he did indeed have food, he’d book it to the bowl and snarf like his life depended on it, but as soon as I walked away he’d follow me screaming again.

Eventually I figured out that he just wanted a dining companion and was screaming about how we’re a family and families eat together, god damnit! I moved his food bowl under my computer desk and it fixed the problem. But if I’m ever out for more than 12 hours I’ll come home to find him in a passive-aggressive kitty huff because dinner has been ready for hours but he’s been trying to be considerate (unlike some humans) and waiting for me to eat it. 

Things my cat has cried at:

  • I wouldn’t let her jump on top of the burning hot stove
  • I moved my coat so that she couldn’t scale the kitchen chair and jump on people’s shoulders when they walked past
  • I didn’t scratch her cheek firmly enough
  • She ate her entire meal allowance for the day in one sitting at 9am and was famished by 10am
  • I didn’t let her sit behind me on the toilet seat
  • I wouldn’t let her eat toothpaste
  • I wouldn’t let her eat the cork from a wine bottle
  • I wouldn’t let her eat the straw that my rabbit had pissed on 

Cats are inherently ridiculous creatures and this is why they are perfect.

Cats are like two year olds but sharp

CATS ARE LIKE TWO YEAR OLDS BUT SHARP