Cedar Waxwings by jocelynefeizo1 http://ift.tt/1RM3Kk0

#do cedar waxwings ever eat anything besides photogenic red berries#do cedar waxwings ever do anything besides eating photogenic red berries#is there any way this child can get its parent to stop feeding it photogenic red berries

watch how many berries I can cram into this other bird

[Image ID: a cedar waxwing chick sits in the grass, waiting for their parent to feed them; two shiny red berries are propped in their open mouth. Beside them, an adult cedar waxwing holds a third shiny red berry in their beak.]

Waxwings are fruigivorous, which means they are typically slamming back photogenic red berries nearly as much as robins throw back a good worm (actually way more, american robins have a highly varied diet). They are one of the only North American birds (maybe THE only?) who can actually digest the sugars found in Amur Honeysuckle (invasive) and benefit from it. So yeah, they’re typically gonna be seen w the berries.

Great Egret (Ardea alba) catching a fish

Warbler Showdown; Bracket 8.2, Poll 2

Flame-throated Warbler (Oreothlypis gutturalis)

Louisiana Waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla)

Image Sources: Flame (Bradley Hacker); Louisiana (Malcolm Kurtz)

[https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/50335435] American Robin || Turdus migratorius Observed in United States Least Concern in location of observation

Fully albino robin!

@kedreeva please ❤️ Albino vs Leucistic?

Yes that's actually an albino! If it was leucistic, the eyes would still be dark instead of red.

"their relationship is strictly platonic" "they're so in love" well, more importantly, they are fucking weird and abnormal about each other in an undeniable way

i appreciate the attempts a lot of game devs are making with gender neutral character creation, and i appreciate that it's actually a very difficult task to implement that depending on the game's base code. but it's so funny to me when you hear an uproar because some game has "entirely removed the gender option from character creation!!!!!" so you go to check it out and its just like

Early spring light makes for great duck portraits

Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites

from “the worst journey in the world” (1922) by apsley cherry-garrard

Nah man that's a northern bobwhite

Aro culture is not understanding anything that has to do with love at first sight. Why are so many people talking about falling in love with someone they never met and only saw one time for a few seconds. What do you mean you’ve imagined a life with this person. You don’t even know their name how have you already developed a crush.

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

They existed *before beetles*

Why is this sad? Why am I sad?

https://xkcd.com/1259/

This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:



First quote from the linked article. Found it poetic.

if you like a piece of media that is good eventually youll more or less run out of things to say about how good it is but if you like a piece of media that is objectively pretty mediocre but also somehow deeply compelling thats how the demons get you

there a baby fox living under our deck and he literally looks like that "full of milk" drawing except somehow rounder

ROTUND

artistic rendition

im actually crying rn thank you so much 

@foxgirlwizard

!!!! its a little ball of fluff with legs!!! i love it!! so cute

come on guys. house sparrows already took America, you’re letting them take this poll?

SALTMARSH SPARROW PROPAGANDAAAAA

Saltmarsh Sparrow Song

Max Nootbar; Brian Sullivan; Matthew Plante