https://bsky.app/profile/sandyhorne.bsky.social/post/3lq5g7brmvk2s

A glitter weevil in Ecuador

https://bsky.app/profile/nathanharness.bsky.social/post/3lq4ao2324c23

In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, they describe how ammonia wafting off the droppings of 60,000 birds contributed to the formation of clouds that might be insulating Antarctica, helping cool down an otherwise rapidly warming continent. Some penguin populations, however, are under serious threat because of climate change. Losing them and their guano could mean fewer clouds and more heating in an already fragile ecosystem, one so full of ice that it will significantly raise sea levels worldwide as it melts.

A better understanding of this dynamic could help scientists hone their models of how Antarctica will transform as the world warms. They can now investigate, for instance, if some penguin species produce more ammonia and, therefore, more of a cooling effect. “That’s the impact of this paper,” said Tamara Russell, a marine ornithologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who studies penguins but wasn’t involved in the research. “That will inform the models better, because we know that some species are decreasing, some are increasing, and that’s going to change a lot down there in many different ways.”

With their expensive instruments, Boyer and his research team measured atmospheric ammonia between January and March 2023, summertime in the southern hemisphere. They found that when the wind was blowing from an Adelie penguin colony 5 miles away from the detectors, concentrations of the gas shot up to 1,000 times higher than the baseline. Even when the penguins had moved out of the colony after breeding, ammonia concentrations remained elevated for at least a month, as the guano continued emitting the gas. That atmospheric ammonia could have been helping cool the area.

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It's a bark lynx spider.

guerilla gardening grows the goods

Love these goobers

Researchers have estimated that hundreds of millions of birds die hitting buildings every year in the United States. These strikes are believed to be one of the factors behind an almost 30 percent drop in North American birds since 1970. Chicago is one of the most dangerous cities in the country for migrating birds, according to research by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. And no building was known to be more lethal than McCormick Place’s Lakeside Center.

One particular day at the building in 2013 - ~1,000 birds died.

Then, on Oct. 5, 2023, Dr. Willard climbed the lakefront steps to the building’s walkway on his routine inspection to find it littered with dead and injured birds. Shocked by the sheer volume, struggling to save the living while gathering the dead, he called a colleague for help. “They were continuing to crash as we were picking them up,” Dr. Willard recalled. The casualties were mostly warblers, but also thrushes, sparrows and others. On the way back to the museum, they carried plastic bags bulging with roughly 975 dead birds.

Dots on the windows

Some of the earliest research on how to make glass safer for birds was conducted by Daniel Klem Jr., an ornithologist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa. He found that falcon silhouettes were not effective. Birds did not register them as predators and simply flew into the adjacent glass. Instead, to effectively deter birds, the glass needed a pattern over its entire surface. A distance of no more than two inches would prevent even tiny hummingbirds from trying to dart through, he said.

Eventually Ms. Clark and her team decided on the dots. The treatment cost $1.2 million, paid for by the state of Illinois. Ms. Clark chose the pattern herself, and it was installed in a hectic three-month period last summer to be in place for fall migration. Visitors don’t seem to even notice the dots from the inside, she said. She knows of no pushback.

[...]

The vast glass windows and doors of the building, called Lakeside Center at McCormick Place, are overlaid with a pattern of close, opaque dots. Applied last summer to help birds perceive the glass, the treatment’s early results are nothing short of remarkable. During fall migration, deaths were down by about 95 percent when compared with the two previous autumns.

[...]

Conservationists are using the building’s success as they continue a longtime campaign to implement a bird-friendly design ordinance in Chicago. “I think that may win the day for us in City Hall,” said Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors. “This is not just a maybe fix, this is going to make a significant difference in bird mortality, and McCormick Place is the poster child.”

It's a ruddy duck which is a stiff-tailed duck.

https://bsky.app/profile/mikemelton.bsky.social/post/3lpondq6zl22m

no using them to figure out where I live, come 'round and make fun of me ok

It's orchids time!

A spider orchid. They're some of my favourites - you don't get the full effect in a photo, because they're big! About the size of your hand, with the petals outstretched. There will be more.

The humble donkey orchid! I don't see a lot of them and didn't get a good photo.

These are pink fairy orchids. They're super cute and there's a path along a creek near where I live where you can see hundreds of them at once which is really lovely, but hard to take a photo of.

Cowslips. I love them, they're really bright and cheerful and again pretty big.

Another spider orchid. King spider orchid, maybe? Lots of white spider orchids where I live - that and green.

But this one has some pink! I love the deep magenta and fringe on the labellum.

And apparently I've hit my limit for one post. I'll leave it for a bit then post more. Probably you can tell I like my orchids (although not every flower photo I take is of one! I get peas and kangaroo paws and their relatives too!) Plenty more where these came from.

On a sweltering January day in 2018, Pope Francis addressed 100,000 of the faithful in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, not far from where gold mining had ravaged an expanse of Amazon rainforest about the size of Colorado. “The native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present,” he told the crowd. He simultaneously condemned extractive industries and conservation efforts that “under the guise of preserving the forest, hoard great expanses of woodland and negotiate with them, leading to situations of oppression for the Native peoples.”

Francis denounced the insatiable consumerism that drives the destruction of the Amazon, supported those who say Indigenous peoples’ guardianship of their own territories should be respected, and urged everyone to defend isolated tribes. “Their cosmic vision and their wisdom have much to teach those of us who are not part of their culture,” he said.

During his 12 years as pontiff, Francis radically reshaped how the world’s most powerful religious institution approached the moral and ethical call to protect the planet. Beyond his invocations for Indigenous rights, Francis acknowledged the Church’s role in colonization, and considered climate change a moral issue born of rampant consumption and materialism. As the Trump administration dismantles climate action and cuts funding to Indigenous peoples around the world — and far-right politics continues to rise globally — experts see the conclave’s selection of Robert Francis Prevost, or Pope Leo XIV, as he is now known, as a clear beacon that the faith-based climate justice movement his predecessor led isn’t going anywhere.

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Decided to go glamping of a sort this weekend. loaded up the back of my truck with shit i never take like a ginormous rotomolded cooler, and a mountainbike, and a cot and tent instead of my hammock and tarp. I even brought my fucking ipad to watch movies from. I brought aUSB powered fan to use in my tent. How bougie am i now? I even have 50 Amperes of 120vAC on tap approx 25' away if i choose to use them.

After dinner i went for a walk on a fishin pier. Ran across almost a dozen of these snakes and maybe five red eared sliders. Im fairly sure the snakes are Diamondback Watersnakes, but im not a snake guy so im going off of sesrching moreso than my own knowledge of snakes. This was the only photo i got of the two species in close proximity together. The lake i am at has Texas Rat Snake, Cottonmouth, Copperhead, Diamondback Watersnake, and maybe a half dozen rattlers of some sort but I'm fairly sure I'm right about the ID here.

The lake has these aluminum things someone welded and they dropped in to provide a habitst for panfish and larger to have somewhere to go. The lake is so low that what is typically 12+ feet below the surface has become a perch for surface life.

Anyway thanks for coming to mutual of omaha's wild kingdom

This shit be fire yo

They also tend to each other's wounds, very cool to learn more about primates.

The better to see you with - motion parallax in young owls

Owls are not really able to move their eyes in their sockets*, so they have to move their entire heads in a somewhat exaggerated manner to change their field of view. This bobbing and head-swaying motion is called motion parallax, and it helps birds (not just owls) more accurately judge distances.

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*more details on this in “Bobbing for Owls”

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The Parallax View (1974)

Director: Alan J. Pakula
Stars: Warren Beatty

An ambitious reporter gets in way-over-his-head trouble while investigating a senator's assassination which leads to a vast conspiracy involving a multinational corporation behind every event in the world's headlines.

Last year while waiting to start my studies, I spent a few months volunteering for a project radio tracking Ringtail Possums. The ringtail possum is a small nocturnal arboreal marsupial, and a lot cuter than opossums

I was involved in all parts of the field work - weighing and measuring, collaring, releasing, getting pissed on (they respect neither god nor man), releasing and tracking the possums.

We did unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) lose some to predation by foxes and cats. These were possums that had been injured and rehabilitated at a wildlife hospital and the high predation rate was pretty much the reason the study was carried out. Obviously not showing photos of those, but it was pretty upsetting for the rehab volunteers (and for we field volunteers too, of course! But we didn't really know the possums personally the way the hospital volunteers did.) We also found a few collars that had fallen off - they're designed with a weak link to try and eliminate any strangulation risk. Mostly the evidence we saw around lost collars suggested they were fine.

We started with 22 candidates for release; one sadly needed to be euthanized before release, due to the severity of its injuries and the fact it wasn't recovering. One was initially released but we then found it dehydrated and disoriented the next day while tracking it, right by a busy street - he was taken back into the hospital for further rehab. Of the others, by the time the several months were up, only I think four were still being tracked (most of the others knocked their collars off - we didn't lose 80% to predators!) which is a good result, to be honest, because this group of possums had been put through "possum finishing school" to try and train them to be scared of predators. Straight releases in the past did show predation rates on that order. So as sad as it was to see the ones that didn't make it, from what we could tell, the rehab's efforts were not in vain and the training did help. Which is especially nice when you consider how devastating it must have been to the hospital to learn that the vast majority of the individuals they treat were being eaten by introduced predators (it's a wildlife hospital, so losing some to eagles or quolls would have been sad but nowhere near as upsetting!)

I got this opportunity as a recent graduate (environmental science and conservation biology) through my contacts at the uni, but members of the public who had volunteered at the wildlife hospital were also involved. It was a very rewarding experience so I highly recommend it to anyone who has a similar opportunity.

Bonus: while out spotlighting a few months after the program ended, I saw some with their babies!

These were brushtail, not ringtail, possums which is why they look a little different. Didn't get a photo but shortly after this, they decided they didn't like being watched and the baby climbed up on mum's back to get a ride away from the strange man with the bright light 🩷