Jack's Fannish Blog

A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.

!!! ok but that’s legitimately what it’s doing!! That’s a corvid right there (looks like a hooded crow, to be precise), which means it’s intelligent enough to recognize, a) cars are dangerous and streets should be treated with a certain degree of caution, b) this car’s slowing down for them–cars do that sometimes–which means they’re not in imminent danger, so it doesn’t have to fly away just yet, c) that hedgehog’s still gonna get killed if it doesn’t MOVE, FAST (cars can change speed very quickly and the hedgehog’s still in the way), and almost certainly also d) if the bird does nothing it gets a free lunch.

Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food. 

i can’t - look if you follow me you know I have a thing for corvids, but this is - like!!! People are always saying “ah yes they have sub-human intelligence and don’t consider anything that isn’t immediately necessary for their own survival/pleasure,” but! Whether or not it can do philosophy, this crow is clearly demonstrating compassion. Even if it’s just the kind of compassion a toddler shows to a snail, a social creature that instinctively recognizes the potential for emotion in other beings, that’s still huge and cool and important and corvids!!! are! neat!!! 

They’re incredibly smart! And kind!!!

i used to work for a nature center and we would constantly have wild owls come and call out to the owls in their cages and try to 1.) get them to follow them or 2.) they were looking for a mate

in the spirit of this post: when you live in areas with wild horses, the number one culprit for horse theft is actually other horses, because the young stallions that get chased out of the herd wanna start their own, and oh, look, look at all those cute mares in just,,,,a fenced off grassy area,,,how easy would it be to lure them over the fence,,,like some four-legged yodeling pied piper,,,

i think about this a lot

This is so cute wtf

Another win for the queer community

this is what leonard nimoy would've wanted

The sidewalks in my neighborhood often feature little wandering moss balls. I have noticed them often and wondered about them. In this part of England, there is a lot of moss always, on everything, everywhere; but that’s sedentary moss, unchanging, holding still - practically characterised by its year-round chilling-out-ness. Moss in the pavement cracks, growing along the buildings and front of garden wall; moss in the gardens and the corners between sidewalk and street. but the tumblemosses are not connected to the continuous belts of stay-at-home moss. They are disconnected, tumbleweeds, pilgrim wanderers: appearing suddenly on the pavement and mooching mysteriously on their own journeys. Like aquarium moss balls but without the currents of the water to justify them. They appear in the middle of the sidewalk in the middle of the town.

The children say they are Moss Children who have broken off from their Moss Family. They often pick them up and carry them around, shouting. Occasionally we have had to take them on train journeys (nobody else seems to have Tumblemoss; it seems to be around our neighborhood.) Sometimes the kids want to make terrariums or things, and so we specifically collect the Tumblemoss, since it’s clearly unrooted and not spoiling anything if we take it home(and I’d feel bad for the kids pulling up actual moss.) but the origins of Tumblemoss, or Moss Children, have always been a bit mysterious. They simply appear, like wild land Marimo, enigmatically. An empty sidewalk in the morning suddenly has a perfect round Moss Child in the afternoon.

Today I learned the secret origin of the Tumblemoss. Would you like to guess it?

Possibly helpful clues:

This is the layout of the road. Moss Children appear on the sidewalks/pavements.

The answer, as many of you guessed, is Bird Activity! Moss Children are created and dropped from above by birds, particularly corvids.

I should have said in the poll - Sometimes you’ll find moss on the ground that slides straight off of roofs, for example in a storm, or because it’s gotten too heavy for the roots to continue sticking to slanted slick roof tiles. These, however, usually don’t form cute little balls. They clearly look like they fell off something. I feel that Moss Children have slightly more mystery about them.

Moss Children are produced differently. Roof gutters especially in climates such as the UK can fill up with moss. Moss often has snacks in it. So small pieces of moss are systematically picked out of roof gutters by corvids. magpies, jackdaws, rooks and crows apparently all do it, creating small bird-beak-sized balls. They are then thrown down to the sidewalk below.

This can be really helpful (in a rainy country you really can’t have blocked gutters) and in some cases really annoying (if you have moss on your roof, corvids will often get carried away and pick at the tiles/felt.) Sometimes you can spot them doing it - other times they try to be sneaky! It took a long time before I finally managed to observe the behavior.

Like many corvid behaviors, it can be localised to specific areas, where they teach each other how to do it. Some neighborhoods will have abundant Moss Children, and other similar ones will never have any at all. However, in neighborhoods that do have them, it seems like many different species of corvids do this - in ours it is both jackdaws and magpies, suggesting that they might learn the behavior by watching each other.

You need several conditions to get Moss Children. A cold wet climate, a densely populated street oriented with their roofs creating their own shade from the sun, with gutters along the front, an educated corvid population, local moss that likes gutters and forms balls when plucked, and so on.

Thanks to all who participated.

on the topic of donkeys as guardian animals:

youve heard of cat bus now get ready for

donkey bus

in some southern european countries where traditional herding is still more common (than where i live) shepherds will often have their big donkeys carry newborn lambs or just young lambs from one pasture to the next !!!

holy shit

If there was one animal literacy thing I could change with a wave of a wand, it would be increasing people's understanding of how dangerous megafauna are. I think that in the US (and probably other Western countries too), we're so removed from wildlife and even large domesticated animals that people really have no perspective on how much a big animal can fuck you up. Even if they're "gentle."

This is a discussion going on on Twitter, too, the last few days: there was a thing where an Iditarod musher shot a moose to protect their team, and a lot of people are confused as to why that needed to happen. Apparently this moose had been hanging around the course for quite a while and was becoming quite dangerous to the sled dog teams. Moose are territorial and not to be fucked with. Everyone from Alaska or areas with moose are like "yup, that's just reality."

Same thing with the bison birth I watched last year. Folk really thought the staff should be in the habitat on the ground with the bison herd, helping with the birth. Sure, that's what we do with cows if we have to, but... bison are definitely not cows and, again, will squish you.

People tend to get it more with the predators. Few people will argue that a cougar or an alligator or a bear isn't dangerous. I think people kinda go both ways on wild pigs / boars depending on their experience. But herbivores or things that don't look traditionally pointy... it just kinda doesn't click.

Any large animal is probably stronger than you think and more likely to hurt you than you realize. Be it a dolphin, an elk, a sea lion, or even an emperor penguin... just don't go near them, buds.

The last few krakens and giant squids I saw in any media had entirely soft suckers like an octopus so now I'm wondering something. Giant squid generally have "tooth lined" suckers, and the colossal squid's two longer tentacles have suckers that evolved into full blown claws all over them.

COOL ocean facts!! Humboldt squid (up two two meters in length) are known to attack people who are diving among them at night! In one of the two most thoroughly documented cases a nature photographer Alex Kerstitch was attacked by multiple humboldts at once who started rapidly pulling him downward, dragging him almost 30 meters deeper into the ocean in just minutes! They were able to tear off some of his equipment but thankfully not his mask, which would have definitely killed him, and they left him covered in bloody cuts!

An even nastier case was ONE OF the times they ganged up on Scott Cassell, a former sniper assassin and underwater combat specialist who now apparently hunts down wildlife poachers (holy shit???), aside from being a sea warrior he is like a lead expert on specifically these squid but his underwater powers and love for them did not stop them from dragging him down so hard they dislocated his shoulder and the pressure change ruptured his eardrum!

This is his own webpage about squids repeatedly beating the ever loving shit out of him and how they will do it to you, too:

Something else I'm not sure if people know or not, unless of course you've ever eaten them, is that cephalopod tentacles are pure solid muscle tissue. When they're outstretched they're more noodly of course but squids can contract them like short fingers as you might have noticed!

Think about how dense and tough that must be! A bunch of them all clenched together in one tight cone! Scott says they will ram into you with this at full speed

......."A large squid moved to within two feet and flashed again. Mesmerized by the strobe effect, I didn’t see that another squid was rushing in from my left. Bam! It hit me with a tentacular strike that felt like being hit with a baseball bat square in the ribs. Shocked by the power of the strike and unable to breathe because of a cramp in my chest, I turned to see what had hit me and saw four more squid headed toward me"

Anyway I wish squid weren't just in the ocean but could fly, I think that would be exciting!

Tailor Birds “Sewing” Nests

(via)

Babe wake up, there’s a bird that can sew!

May I present to you Wheel Running In the Wild, a published research paper that delights me to no end:

This paper intended to test whether would mice would run on a wheel if they found one, to try and determine if this was a natural behavior or a stress response in captivity. They put a wheel in a protected little box with a camera that took pictures any time the wheel turned, and tallied up how often it was used by what.

Mice were, happily, the most common users of the wheel, and their patterns of use indicated they were doing so voluntarily once they figured it out.

But the second most common users.

Those were slugs.

cuddling

Important addition:

A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.

!!! ok but that’s legitimately what it’s doing!! That’s a corvid right there (looks like a hooded crow, to be precise), which means it’s intelligent enough to recognize, a) cars are dangerous and streets should be treated with a certain degree of caution, b) this car’s slowing down for them–cars do that sometimes–which means they’re not in imminent danger, so it doesn’t have to fly away just yet, c) that hedgehog’s still gonna get killed if it doesn’t MOVE, FAST (cars can change speed very quickly and the hedgehog’s still in the way), and almost certainly also d) if the bird does nothing it gets a free lunch.

Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food. 

i can’t - look if you follow me you know I have a thing for corvids, but this is - like!!! People are always saying “ah yes they have sub-human intelligence and don’t consider anything that isn’t immediately necessary for their own survival/pleasure,” but! Whether or not it can do philosophy, this crow is clearly demonstrating compassion. Even if it’s just the kind of compassion a toddler shows to a snail, a social creature that instinctively recognizes the potential for emotion in other beings, that’s still huge and cool and important and corvids!!! are! neat!!! 

They’re incredibly smart! And kind!!!

Finally some good fucking news

they concluded that the rats were having fun partially bc the rats voluntarily initiated games, hopped around joyfully and teased researchers by pretending to come close and then skittering away. rats are Very Good

These scientists are getting grant money to play games with rats all day and that is just, living the dream.

@presidentofthehotgirlclub not a kitty video, but i think you'll like this if you haven't seen it already

"There are no monsters in the sea, only the ones we make up in our heads" Bless you, ma'am.

OMG That is so cute!!

Also the reason that the cat did this is actually because they are mirroring their owner. If their owner treats the thing (or in this case book) with respect and has made it very clear with their actions that the thing is important the cat will take notice and mirror this behavior!

Great addition! However, this is actually because the cat is Muslim.

phantom bitchslap

That is the saddest and funniest shit I have ever seen

The cat is right-pawed and I’m laughing too hard about this.

this is actually really interesting because despite not actually having that limb the cat is still able to communicate exactly what it’s trying to (which seems to be “don’t touch this cup” or “this is my box”). the other cats respond to its gesturing because they recognize what it’s saying (you can see them pull their heads back or bat their own paws in response). most of the time when cats tell each other to stop doing something they aren’t actually using any real force–it’s just a gentle bop. the hitting isn’t really the point!

i actually do a version of this with my own cats all the time. i never hit them but i’ll wave a hand at them to say “no stop it” and they understand fully despite the fact that i never make physical contact with them.

this cat may be disabled but it is perfectly capable of telling its friends and family to step the fuck off

@socalgal

Most autistic dog to ever exist