#Great White Pelican

[inatungulates]

Red lechwe Kobus leche

With great white pelican Pelecanus onocrotalus

Observed by tjeales, CC BY-SA

[haveyouseenthisbirdpoll]

photo source

[critter-creature-or-beast]

Submitted for classification by gnuborn

[birdblues]

Great White Pelican

[nature-nerd-sarah]

Posting birds until I hit post limit: Great white pelican

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Meet Bill by Joshua Kneale from Pewsey, Wiltshire

Photograph: Joshua Kneale/RSPCA/PA

Royal Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Animals: Young Photographer Award Winners

[oneanimalpictureaday]

Great white pelicans, not sure if this one is from Munich as well...

Fact for animalcorner : Great White Pelicans feed mainly up on fish such as carp and cichlids but will also eat small invertebrates. These water birds do not have to dive to catch their prey, instead they use their large bills to scoop the fish into their mouths by dipping their heads into the water.Feeding is sometimes done cooperatively, whereby, several Pelicans will move into a circle to concentrate the fish and dip their heads into the water in unison to catch the fish. This makes for successful fishing. Each Pelican needs about 1.2 kilograms (2.6 pounds) of fish every day.

[helluvatimes]

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

A Great White Pelikan getting ready for its afternoon snooze in the Singapore Zoo. Photo credit: Jonathan Chua.

The white feathers of this pelikan could have been easily washed out under the mid-afternoon sun. So I had the exposure biased darker by 2/3 stop to preserve feather details and then exposed the image to the right in post.

[antiqueanimals]

Pelican. From From a wood engraving in colours by Walther Klemm.

From The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine & Applied Art. Vol. 53. No. 219. June 15, 1911.

Internet Archive

[julianbashir]

here are all the birding pics i took during my vacation in socal! bird species in the alt/description text :]

here are also some pictures of the island foxes, which are endemic only to the channel islands. they were about the size of a small chihuahua and sooooo cute

also, uh. these fat ground squirrels that got too lost in the sauce

[caveundertree]

Water birds eating fish as fast as they can

Abundance

[tomorrowusa]

The Great Salt Lake is drying up and the Republican government of Utah is doing little to save it. They constantly cave to the usual groups: agricultural interests, mining, homeowners who like spacious lawns in an arid region, and big industry.

The largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere has been steadily shrinking, as more and more water has been diverted away from the lake to irrigate farmland, feed industry and water lawns. A megadrought across the US south-west, accelerated by global heating, has hastened the lake’s demise. Unless dire action is taken, the lake could decline beyond recognition within five years, a report published early this year warned, exposing a dusty lakebed laced with arsenic, mercury, lead and other toxic substances.The resulting toxic dustbowl would be “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, the ecologist Ben Abbott of Brigham Young University told the Guardian earlier this year. Despite such warnings, officials have failed to take serious action, local groups said in their lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday. “We are trying to avert disaster. We are trying to force the hand of state government to take serious action,” said Brian Moench of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, one of the groups suing state agencies. “Plaintiffs pray that this Court declare that the State of Utah has breached its trust duty to ensure water flows into the Great Salt Lake sufficient to maintain the Lake,” reads the lawsuit, which was brought by coalition that includes Earthjustice, the Utah Rivers Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club, among others.

Political pressure has not been very effective in a state dominated by Republicans. The state's response is lukewarm at best. That's in addition to bizarre proposals.

The state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, has suspended new claims to water in the Great Salt Lake basin and appointed a commissioner to oversee response to the lake crisis. Last year, Utah’s legislature passed several conservation measures, including a $40m trust to support lake preservation projects. But Abbott and his colleagues, who authored a sobering report on the lake in January, found that those measures increased flows to the lake by just 100,000 acre feet in 2022. About 2.5m acre-feet a year of water will need to flow into the lake to bring it to a healthy level, the researchers estimated. That water will likely have to come at the expense of agriculture, which takes in about three-quarters of the water diverted away from the lake to grow mostly alfalfa and hay. Cities and mineral extraction operations each take up another 9% of diverted water. But wresting water away from agriculture is politically complicated. Officials have explored propositions to pay farmers to fallow land and use less water, though such proposals have yet to gain much tractions. Lawmakers have also offered up a series of out-of-the-box solutions – including cloud seeding, which uses chemicals to prompt more precipitation – or building a giant pipeline from the Pacific Ocean.

Seriously, a pipeline from the Pacific Ocean? This is a classic idiotic GOP way to deal with an environmental catastrophe which doesn't get to the root of the problem.

Already, the lake has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area, and is becoming saltier, threatening native flies and brine shrimp. A diminished lake may be unable to support the more than 10 million migratory birds that stop over in the region. A white pelican colony recently abandoned a nesting site on the lake, potentially due to declining water levels. “In addition to the millions of people who live here, so many plants and animals depend on the lake,” said Deeda Seed, Utah campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The health of northern Utah’s entire population depends on the Great Salt Lake’s survival and I hope this lawsuit can help save it.”

^^^ emphasis added

Yep, take their asses to court to save the body of water which gave the state's largest city its name.

[lykosidae]

American White Pelicans in front of a Great Blue Heron nesting

I don't think the heron was pleased with the visitors, saw one flying away shortly afterwards. Hopefully just off to get some food.

[crudlynaturephotos]

[what-is-this-rubbish]

Some solid birds while out scouting my field sites

[fandomsandfeminism]

Ok. So, just saw The Boy and the Heron a second time.

I'm going to talk through some thoughts.

So, leaving the theater, my mom asked "but why was the Parakeet King Mussolini?"

And.

Ok, so the movie is about grief. But it's also about loss and change and impermanence. People are impermanent. Places are impermanent. Systems too are impermanent. The world is impermanent and nothing, no legacy or heirs or descendents can make these things last beyond their due time. (How fitting that Hime holds the power of fire. What better holds the duality of change than fire?)

The Parakeets, always hungry, are living in a dying world. They are desperate to save it, to preserve it, keep it from changing. (In the end, they are changed, released into the world still alive but different. Will they be happier in the real world? The Pelicans surely will be. Does it matter of they are happier so long as they are still alive?)

Fascism, in its rhetoric, often preaches about protecting a mythic past, making your nation great again, preserving, conserving values and systems and power- being against "progress for the sake of progress."

So the Parakeets are fascist. Even when the Parakeet King gains power- grabs the blocks to try to keep the world as it is, he fails. He makes the world crumble even faster, in fact, in his attempts to gain power.

Right?

I'm still sorting through a lot of the stuff in the movie. (The glass pilot cockpits in the house that look like coffins. Hime being held in a glass coffin like Snow White. The warawara. God the warawara. How hime protects them but burns some of them to save the rest. The way the pelicans are always hungry. The Parakeets are always hungry. Ugh so many thoughts.)