Owls confirmed to be the creepiest birds ever. LOOK AT THE FUCKING THINGS. If you fail to notice the one on the left fucking SWALLOWING a rat, then you have the dude singing some satanic chant or something next to him, and then you have those two other fucking psychos synchronized to make you feel creeped the fuck out with their soulless dance of FUCKING DOOM.
I really am tempted to reblog this every time it’s on my dash. That description is one of the best things on the internet.
Yeahhhh, I want this on my blog again.
OMG MY FAVORITE TUMBLR POST EVER IT’S FINALLY BACK YAY!
Here, have another of my all-time favorite Tumblr posts.
We were just discussing this again and I had to reblog it again because IT IS MY FAVORITE
I’m permanently traumatized that you introduced me to this over lunch, EGT.
::bows with a flourish::
There’s a gif out there of some people reenacting this that makes me laugh til I puke every damn time.
in high school I did summer programs at the art school near me: California College of the Arts, formerly California College of Arts and Crafts. A lot of students really opposed the name change, feeling that it marginalized crafts, and they were still pretty mad about it although it had happened several years before. A popular method of protest was to print “and Crafts” stickers and slap them onto the end of signs that had been redone with the new name.
BUT THEN someone had the incredible idea of just putting the stickers… on any signs with text… leading to such memorable mashups as “EXIT and Crafts” “MEN and Crafts” and probably like, “Please bus your own dishes and Crafts.”
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?
The continued adventures of Taako, whose very survival is a mystery currently being studied by scientists worldwide.
“Stunning production values, a shoe-in for the Best Editing category and a fair argument for Best Director. The struggle of this very dumb boy will have you laughing, crying, and remembering exactly what it is that makes us human.”
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 