@tinylongwing / tinylongwing.tumblr.com
Pardon the dust! I've just moved my shop to INPRNT and am working on uploading prints for purchase. INPRNT offers high-quality prints and right now, this weekend, there's an additional sale going on, too!
They do not offer some of the fun things soc6 had (pillows, mugs) but on the plus side, they aren't asking me to pay them to host my prints, and aren't completely robbing my cut of sales (honestly, my last "paycheck" from soc6 was 31 cents!!!). If you're interested in a print, check it out!
Ko'ko' bird (Guam Rail) is a critically endangered species in the Mariana Islands. Once considered extinct in the wild, a few are now found on Cocos Island off Guam. Currently the bulk of the population is in captive breeding programs. They are mainly threatened by invasive snakes & feral cats.
Ko'ko' bird (Guam Rail) is a critically endangered species in the Mariana Islands. Once considered extinct in the wild, a few are now found on Cocos Island off Guam. Currently the bulk of the population is in captive breeding programs. They are mainly threatened by invasive snakes & feral cats.
Vide Noir gave us a character and immediately took him away again and that's cruel so here's a much better look at Alex Redmayne than the one we got.
I found some new reference material and I intend to abuse it so here's a Johnnie doodle before I get back to art I'm supposed to be doing
Before I head back to Rota, I will be on Saipan for a few days. Canario here (Golden White-eye) is an endangered species found only on Saipan and Aguijan, though it probably was also on Tinian and Rota in the past. Their thrush-like habits and songs are very unlike most other white-eyes.
Fieldwork here on Rota is well underway, with about half of our mist-netting lanes and trails marked and prepped for next month's bird banding. But along the way, we find all kinds of incredible landscapes and hidden treasures.
Top left: A WWII Japanese artillery gun sunk into a manmade cave in a limestone wall. The old gun is being overtaken by the jungle and has ferns and moss growing all over the barrel.
Top right: An old wrecked boat inside the lagoon on Rota's northwestern shore, with brilliant blue sky above and turquoise water below.
Bottom left: Guam Coenogyne, a rare endangered orchid found only on Rota and Guam. This white flower with a red center emerges from a swirl of large bulbs with leaves that cling to the bark of a mossy tree.
Bottom right: An unbroken green glass bottle that originally held soy sauce, from sometime in the 1920s-40s when Rota was a Japanese colony.
Fieldwork here on Rota is well underway, with about half of our mist-netting lanes and trails marked and prepped for next month's bird banding. But along the way, we find all kinds of incredible landscapes and hidden treasures.
Top left: A WWII Japanese artillery gun sunk into a manmade cave in a limestone wall. The old gun is being overtaken by the jungle and has ferns and moss growing all over the barrel.
Top right: An old wrecked boat inside the lagoon on Rota's northwestern shore, with brilliant blue sky above and turquoise water below.
Bottom left: Guam Coenogyne, a rare endangered orchid found only on Rota and Guam. This white flower with a red center emerges from a swirl of large bulbs with leaves that cling to the bark of a mossy tree.
Bottom right: An unbroken green glass bottle that originally held soy sauce, from sometime in the 1920s-40s when Rota was a Japanese colony.
Before I head back to Rota, I will be on Saipan for a few days. Canario here (Golden White-eye) is an endangered species found only on Saipan and Aguijan, though it probably was also on Tinian and Rota in the past. Their thrush-like habits and songs are very unlike most other white-eyes.
Back to the Marianas next week! Here are two field sketchbook pages I didn't manage to post yet, of fanihi (Mariana fruit bat) and sali (Micronesian Starling).
Fanihi were kind of everywhere on Rota, and I saw more of them in five days there than I have in all my time working on Saipan over the years. It's good to know that their population is healthy there, though the locals said that they were seeing them more than usual also because of a behavioral change. Typhoons in 2023 had stripped the trees of flowers and fruit and delayed the new fruiting season, so part of the reason fanihi were so visible was that they were spending a lot more time than before having to find food.
Pretty important when doing any kind of science to keep behavior and detectability in mind - seeing more bats doesn't always mean there are more bats, just that they may be more visible than normal for other reasons.
i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year
actually i'm reblogging this again with commentary, fuck it.
There's people in the notes talking about "not basing your worth off numbers", and like. that isn't what this post is about. It's not a threat, either, it's a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.
Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.
They don't do anything. They're a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didn't even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we don't. They're personal bookmarks and the only people who "get" anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they don't keep the post in circulation, they don't keep it alive.
Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it. And there's a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, that's how posts stay alive and in circulation. It's like a contagion, but we're sharing creativity instead of disease.
And that matters. That "lifespan" of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts. We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue. But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means it's not making it onto your dashboard. And if it's not on your dashboard, you won't see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesn't have an algorithm like twitter and insta's and it shouldn't, it's the last bastion of chronological timelines.
Forgive my giant fucking rant I am so tired right now and full of the plague but like stop acting like artists and writers are just being whiny little babies, or "threatening" to withhold our fucking work (you're not entitled to it! it's ours! if we get nothing out of sharing it we're well within our rights to keep it private!) when we say this site will dry up without reblogs. We're just stating facts.
also I’ve seen some people in the tags say ‘oh there have always been more likes on posts’ no there haven’t ????
these are posts from 2013, look at the ratio
not to sound like a nursing home resident but back then people know that the point of this site was to reblog things and share them, not to bury them away among your other 23k liked posts
There 👏 is 👏 no 👏 like- 👏 algorithm 👏 on 👏 tumblr 👏 !
Stats for my latest story, posted 12hrs ago. I'm the blue dot in the middle and the dot out on a limb with its own little cluster is my story archive blog, so it's also me.
Back to the Marianas next week! Here are two field sketchbook pages I didn't manage to post yet, of fanihi (Mariana fruit bat) and sali (Micronesian Starling).
Fanihi were kind of everywhere on Rota, and I saw more of them in five days there than I have in all my time working on Saipan over the years. It's good to know that their population is healthy there, though the locals said that they were seeing them more than usual also because of a behavioral change. Typhoons in 2023 had stripped the trees of flowers and fruit and delayed the new fruiting season, so part of the reason fanihi were so visible was that they were spending a lot more time than before having to find food.
Pretty important when doing any kind of science to keep behavior and detectability in mind - seeing more bats doesn't always mean there are more bats, just that they may be more visible than normal for other reasons.
Philippine Collared-Dove (Streptopelia dusumieri). Declining in their home range (Philippines), but quite common in villages of the Northern Mariana Islands where they were introduced sometime in the 1700s. Now considered naturalized, they're charming & sort of goofy with their hoarse cooing from the power lines and coconut palms.
Philippine Collared-Dove (Streptopelia dusumieri). Declining in their home range (Philippines), but quite common in villages of the Northern Mariana Islands where they were introduced sometime in the 1700s. Now considered naturalized, they're charming & sort of goofy with their hoarse cooing from the power lines and coconut palms.
I keep track of intergrade Northern Flickers in my yard because I have so many I'm constantly tripping the ebird filter on the counts. Here are the individuals for this winter so far that I can distinguish.
Northern Flickers typically are either Red-shafted (North America west of the Rocky Mountains) or Yellow-shafted (North America east of the Rocky Mountains) but there's a large zone of overlap where they interbreed. The offspring are known as intergrades, not hybrids, because they're still the same species but a mix of subspecies types.
Finally, I’m so excited to get to announce the project I spent all of last winter and spring on! Birdwatcher is now up on kickstarter! This is a board game where you get to play as a photographer trying to document the birds of paradise. Check it out here!
The cover features a male Blue Bird-of-Paradise in his unusual upside-down display pose trying to court a female, surrounded by the lush vegetation of their home range in New Guinea.
