Very impressed with this clever grackle snatching a minnow right out of the creek. Watching birds hunt always makes me feel like an early cretaceous naturalist observing a Utahraptor outsmart its prey.

Grackles are incredible opportunists. They'll eat anything and everything they can get ahold of.

So I'm putting this here as a sort of public service. If you have never seen a rabid animal before, and you think you can handle watching it, I think it's a good idea to watch this. It's pretty upsetting to watch, so big CW on it, because this animal is essentially "dead but still moving." This is end-stage rabies. There is no saving this animal.

Before this stage, animals may be excessively affectionate or oddly tame-looking which is part of the reason why seeing people feeding foxes is upsetting to me. These animals might be, or might become, rabid, and there's no way to know without testing, which involves destroying the animal. Encouraging wild animals to be that close to humans is generally bad.

I grew up in the woods, so unfortunately we saw an uptick in rabid animals every spring -- you'd hear there was a rabid bat in this neighborhood or a rabid fox in this one -- but as wild animals and humans cross over more and more, we will see this more and more.

Opossums and squirrels extremely rarely get rabies, and we don't know why. They think the low body temperature of opossums inhibits the virus. The most common animals which get rabies in the US are raccoons, skunks, bats and foxes. Any animal 'acting unusually' -- not skittish around humans, biting at the air or at nothing ('fly-biting'), walking strangely (they kind of look like they have a string attached to their heads and walk kind of diagonal like they're being pulled along, a lot of the time) -- should be treated as though it's potentially rabid.

If you think you have been exposed to a rabid animal, including 'waking up in a room where a bat has gotten into it and there's a fucking bat in your room', please immediately go to the emergency room. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Post-exposure prophylaxis absolutely fucking sucks, it is a series of shots you'll have to get in two stages, it's done by weight, and it feels fucking nasty, but rabies is 100% fatal. I cannot stress enough how essential this is, having been through it.

Thank you for reading, I love everybody, the end.

To be clear, I have been through post-exposure prophylaxis for rabies. In 2005 or early 2006, I forget which exactly, @urbanprole and I woke up with a bat in our bedroom bc our apartment maintenance hadn't closed up the HVAC system after replacing filters. I shooed the bat out with a broom and it was acting normally for a bat but we didn't take any chances. (Thankfully, MK was at her dad's that weekend.)

I felt absolutely wretched the next day - the worst I've ever felt, excluding surgery and childbirth - after each series of shots. I had to get 2 sets on different days. I got 8 shots the first day, and Emet got like 13 or 15 bc she's very tall, and it's done by mass. The only thing I can think to compare it to is the depths of COVID, but without the coughing. Your immune system is Working Hard to update itself so it can recognize and fight any possible exposure.

I basically laid in bed and ached and sweated and groaned, but after it was over, I was fine.

Fewer than 20 people have ever survived rabies, and none are known to have survived without immediate post-exposure prophylaxis. Do not fuck around with this. Do not approach strange stray or wild mammals, especially without protective clothing.

Several comments on this post talking about 'why can't the US eradicate rabies entirely' and my friends, it can be really hard to understand how fucking big the United States is, and how weird it is to have basically 50 small countries in a trenchcoat. Like, we're fighting each other right now in courts over medicine, for one thing, and for another...

Like, one of the people commenting on this post and wondering this is from Portugal. Portugal is 35,603 square miles, and the United States is 3.97 million square miles. Portugal is 0.0093% the size of the United States, which... yeah. Like. The single state that I grew up in (Pennsylvania) is 46K square miles.

So, like, for one thing, this country is trying not to explode while a small group of people try to make it explode. And for another?

The US? Is. Fucking. Huge.

Australia doesn't have Rabies, because as far as I'm aware it just never got here and we work hard to keep it that way.

But we do have Bat Derived Lyssavirus, which is basically a rabies doppelganger... Don't fuck around with bats. Go to a Dr if you come into contact with a bat because you don't always notice a scratch/bite in the moment.

No need to be afraid of bats, just appreciate them from a distance... They're wild animals. If you find a bat in distress call a ranger.

The thing about bats is that they have very small teeth. A bite from a small bat looks like a needle poke, maybe a bug bite. If it’s on your scalp or anywhere else you can’t easily see, you’d never notice. They’re not normally dangerous, but a rabid bat is dangerous to a sleeping person because it can bite you without you realizing, at the time or afterward, that anything’s happened. And that is what rabid animals do- it’s the only thing they’re meant to do, at that point. It’s not a bat any more, it’s a rabies vehicle. 

WITH DEATH COMES LIFE (Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event) ((66.0 MYA))

Not good enough for my photoblog, but still wanted to share.

This little lady is the bane of all the photogs at the wildlife reserve.  She’s super fast, super shy, and super skittish.  Everybody I talk to has a story of just missing the shot with her.

I managed to get reasonably close to where she was perched on a nesting platform.  But then she zipped over to the other side of the pond.  I had set up on her, tripod set up, lens aimed.  Ready and waiting for her to dive for a fish.

But I swear, the second that I looked away, she dove down and snagged one.  Best I could get was a VERY distant shot of her perched with it in her mouth.  I had to crop it in like crazy, so it’s not a great shot.

But SOMEDAY!  Someday, I’ll get that perfect shot of this elusive girl.

Thanks, @bettsplendens​!

I’m going to keep at it, I’ll get a good one eventually!  Contemplating even going as far as setting up a blind and sitting in it until she comes close enough.  Just not sure what reaction I’ll get setting up a blind in a public park, lol.

That’s awesome about the green kingfishers!  I bet you got some great shots out of that!

Nowhere near as nice as yours (and you must have a heck of a camera if those pics up there aren’t good enough), but I’m just happy to have gotten a good look. Never been this close to any sort of kingfisher in my life. They were headbobbing and chattering at me, but I think the few minutes they spent fighting the mockingbird let them realize that I wasn’t getting any closer or trying to eat them, because they didn’t leave! I took a few quick shots and left so I wouldn’t stress them any further. 

I didn’t want to move around and try for a better angle, since I was shocked they hadn’t bolted already, so: twig and glare party. 

Kingfishers, for anyone not familiar with them, tend to be flighty and easily spooked. If they see you too close, they bolt, chattering loudly to let you know they’ve seen you. For comparison’s sake, my pics of Belted Kingfishers usually look about like this: 

Because getting within 50 yards of them sends them to a further perch, if they don’t bolt entirely. I’ve found individuals that will pack up and leave if they see you at all, no matter how far away. Granted, I’m sure OP has a better camera than my little compact Nikon Coolpix, but those shots are still really impressive. 

Ahhh!  They’re beautiful!  I love the one where he’s peeking back over the plants.  <3  We don’t get Green Kingfishers around here, but I’m hoping maybe to spot one this summer while traveling.  They’re such lovely birbs!

And the Coolpix lineup is a fun camera series.  I shot one of them for years (an old 990). You’re doing great with yours!  Half the battle is getting close enough to get a shot and you got super close to those guys!  That’s fantastic!

Thank you! That was the first male I’d managed to find, so I was double-happy to get a shot of him. Wonderful little birds. Walked around a bend, following the chattering streaks of green I’d just seen go upriver, and found these maybe 20-30 feet from me. They don’t live around my house, but I’ve seen them a few times on an exotic animal ranch (antelope, deer, and so on) out in the cowboy parts of the state. Ox Ranch, in TX. Great for Vermillion Flycatchers also, if you’re ever nearby, plus lots of Painted Buntings in spring-summer and a number of Harris’ Hawks. 

Most of the Green Kingfishers I’ve seen out there have set up shop near shallow, wide areas of the creek, water that comes maybe halfway up  your shins at most. I’d say to check near shallow water for them, except that I’ve seen one female living near the deepest part of the creek as well, and I don’t have a large enough sample size (maybe half a dozen sightings, not sure how many individuals) to be sure whether the shallow water is pattern or coincidence. 

Good luck finding some! I can tell you that these are definitely easily spooked, but might not be quite as bad as the Belted Kingfishers, given how close this pair tolerated me standing.  Their cry sounds about like you’d expect from a kingfisher, that loud chattering, and they fly low over the water to get away when you spook them. The Belted Kingfishers seem to like high points, particularly telephone lines, but the Green Kingfishers always seem to have much lower perches. 

I did some reading about cameras for casual birding, and the Coolpix 950 seemed like the best option in this price and weight range, so I went with it. I love it. Enough zoom for what I’m after without being really heavy, it has a built-in point-focus birding mode, and it works. My one complaint is that the battery indicator always says either “you have lots of battery” or “you have only a little battery”, no in-betweens. I’d really prefer a “you have half a battery” mark somewhere in there, but oh well; spare batteries are cheap enough. I just keep a spare in my pocket when I go out. Or two in my bag, if it’s a longer trip. 

Oh, that’s a great camera!  I ran into a photographer a few months back using one.  She mentioned the battery thing too, actually.  It’s super impressive that it’s got such a great zoom built in, though, especially at such a low weight.  And reasonably priced, too!  Sounds like a great choice!

Funny you mention… would you believe I just saw my very first Vermilion Flycatcher just a couple weeks ago?  It was an immature male, so not fully colored yet.  But I had no idea we even got them out this way (Southern California), so it was pretty surprising!

Turned around and spotted him sitting behind me on a post.  I was so excited!  I’m determined to go back and find a mature male now to photograph in that area.

Thanks for the kingfisher tips!  Fingers crossed I can find some. :D

Oh, what a lovely little sunset guy, congratulations! I’ve never seen a male at that life stage, only in full color or no color. And what a full color they have! 

My bird guide describes them as “uncommon and local”, which, from context, seems to mean “if you can find where they live, there should be a lot of them”. You might have seen from your guy, they make really good photography subjects; they pick a high, visible spot and stay there, briefly fluttering away to grab prey before returning. Heck, your guy might even have chosen that pipe as his specific perch. Check back at that exact spot next time you go looking for him. 

That’s the full zoom on this camera. Turned “are those some birds out there, maybe?” into my first photographed Wilson’s Snipe. I haven’t had much opportunity to compare it to other cameras in person, but I did have a lady who was using a telescope-sized lens say she might have to get one like mine, after I demonstrated it on a handily available Great Blue Heron. High praise compared to a camera that can photograph birds from across a canal, I think! 

Gisela Delpho.

This was really interesting. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to add my "thanks, I hate it" to the pile.

Now I'm wondering if, since damage to their exoskeleton persists until the next moult, a cracked exoskeleton will mess with their internal pressure (spiders are pressurised - I will never unsee this factoid. What a world).

good news!

why is this so fucking comical

yeah you must fucken .... you stress out the toad and then give it a rinse, voilah

"Did you get out all your evil juice? Did you get it all out? Yea? Good now I'm gonna eat you"

—Ibis

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

Don’t fuck with flamingos

….. Didn’t know most of that

Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.

Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.

American flamingos just drink that shit

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.

cat teefs

My brother found this skull on his college campus, already clean, and gave it to me. There’s a substantial feral cat population there, so this is likely one of them. I’m not sure what caused that damage- best guess is squirrels or whatnot chewing it. I also have no way to know what it died of. Probably feral cat reasons.

I’m posting this as a comparison to the teeth that @pangur-and-grim​‘s poor Pangur had to have removed, which are/were all messed up. You can see the removed teef here, and a picture of the poor thing’s teeth, still in situ, here. Even this skull, with no gums whatsoever, is showing less tooth root. 

Thought people might find it interesting to see. As far as I know, this is roughly what cat teeth are meant to look like.  

Oop, there go my notifications. 

(Not a complaint, this is funny. Let’s see how high that peak goes!)

skeleton of cave bear in Bears Cave, Romania

wonder why it’s called that

This sent me down a massive historical rabbit hole, but, long story short: it’s called Romania because there were once Romans there.

Abnormal Roe Deer Skull.

I read somewhere that antlers are essentially a type of modified, domesticated bone cancer. Guess this is what happens when your domesticated bone cancer goes feral. 

A lot of those projections don’t appear to have the normal texture and separation that antlers do, particularly those pale white areas on the right. Does anyone know, would those have shed along with the normal antlers, or are they probably permanent? 

Some of the projections seem like they might still have been covered in skin at the time of death. I wonder what this poor thing looked like alive. 

*waves* So these happens when the base of the antler is injured, the part where the antlers grow from each year. Because this is where the cells proliferate from, and they can be pushed to other parts of the skull when there is an injury. This is why you see antlers growing directly from the bone, as bone, especially on the right there. Damage to the testicles and fluctuations in the production of testosterone, as infection with papillomavirus are also a seemingly common source of this. It might also happen because of an infection, and these antlers keep their velvet, which makes them grow constantly. And because trauma caused them to get out of bonds, there is no clear way in which they will grow. They can grow like tree branches, or turn into something looking like moss. Because they stay in velvet, they are also prone to more injury. Velvet is bloodvessel rich, so no chance for the stag/buck to properly fight for mating rights. As the antlers are also used to get stuff out of the way, another part of where this becomes a problem. Sometimes these antlers can overgrow the whole head, and they are also heavy. Warning for animal death and such

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Abnormal Roe Deer Skull.

I read somewhere that antlers are essentially a type of modified, domesticated bone cancer. Guess this is what happens when your domesticated bone cancer goes feral. 

A lot of those projections don’t appear to have the normal texture and separation that antlers do, particularly those pale white areas on the right. Does anyone know, would those have shed along with the normal antlers, or are they probably permanent? 

Some of the projections seem like they might still have been covered in skin at the time of death. I wonder what this poor thing looked like alive. 

a great horned owl will look at a screech owl and be like “i have to eat that guy”

“wow he’s just like me but small. Delicious”

owls are just like that

#the turducken