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Easy Action Item! Help Wildland Firefighters from getting a 50% pay cut!

Hey everyone, I have a quick and easy action item that could make a HUGE difference going forward.

Wildland Firefighters are currently facing a MASSIVE pay cut, and by massive I mean up to 50%. Yes. Fifty. Percent.

WF pay has been an issue basically forever, but for awhile the government has been kicking the can down the road with various "retention bonuses," but those are set to expire soon and if a permanent solution isn't passed, firefighters are screwed, and so is every single person and business that exists in the wildland urban interface. We need our firefighters more than ever, and right now they need US to help get this passed.

You can read more about the issue, its history, and the proposed solutions here, on the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters page. They have been a major driving force to get this issue taken care of once and for all.

The GWF page has also put together a handy dandy tool to automatically send a letter to your senators asking them to pass the legislation necessary to permanently fix this issue. Please, please take a couple minutes to fill it out and send this letter in, and share this post so other people can do it too.

Contact your senators now.

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here have this picture i made and forgot about until now

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Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.

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Del Norte, California by David Thompson

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For the first time, researchers have found evidence that underwater ecosystems have pollinators that perform the same task as bees on land.

Just like their terrestrial cousins, grasses under the sea shed pollen to sexually reproduce. Until now, biologists assumed the marine plants relied on water alone to spread their genes far and wide. But the discovery of pollen-carrying ‘bees of the sea’ has changed all of that.

Over several years from 2009 to 2012, researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico filmed the spring nocturnal wanderings of crustaceans among beds of turtle seagrass, Thalassia testudinum.

Looking through the videos, they spotted more invertebrates visiting male pollen-bearing flowers than those that lacked pollen – just like bees hovering around pollen-producing plants on land.

“We saw all of these animals coming in, and then we saw some of them carrying pollen,” lead researcher Brigitta van Tussenbroek told New Scientist.

The concept was so new, they invented a new term to describe it: zoobenthophilous pollination. Before that, researchers had never predicted that animals were involved in pollinating marine plants.

Continue Reading.

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hercules

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its time to think about critters

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today's bug thing are these very hungry caterpillar socks!

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courtney wilson

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Four mustangs running through the Pryor Mountains By: Nicholas DeVore III From: Wild, Wild World of Animals: Wild Herds 1977

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A cave at the mouth of Walnut Canyon, along the Arizona Trail on July 12, 2023

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paintings I did between mile 699 to mile 495 of the Arizona trail, an ~800 mile thru hike. Lucked out with the aspens! I caught a bit of snow as well, but was too cold to paint in it.

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wikipedia editors are like if redditors were monks

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everyone please admire this genital dissection i did today while trying to identify this male longhorn bee. i avoided doing these for the longest time but it really is the only way to reliably ID a huge chunk of bee species. i spent like an hour trying to key this guy out using external morphological features but it only took about 10 seconds once i yanked his crazy little hog out and compared it against the big chart of bee dicks. he's a Eucera amsinckiae.

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spiderweb by Kay Ryan