#Nerd Bird

[extrashortshorts]

Fish 3

but without fish

Phoenix Marco fighting his intrusive thoughts-

[tenderanarchist]

These are so fun to make

[nepeteaa]

warbler season! my collection with Bird Collective is up!

[montereybayaquarium]

The four stages of becoming a birder:

🪹Nestling Phase: You start with a casual interest, peeking out of your cozy comfort zone to notice the birds around you.

🐤Fledgling Feats: You spread your wings, equipped with binoculars and guidebooks, ready to explore new habitats and spot diverse species.

🐦‍⬛Perching Proficiency: Your skills sharpen as you learn to identify birds by their calls, habits, and plumage, and feel a sense of accomplishment with each new sighting.

🦅Masterful Migration: Finally, you soar confidently, traversing landscapes near and far, sharing your passion with others. In the end, the true joy of birding lies in the journey itself—every chirp, flutter, and waddle along the way.

Happy National Go Birding Day!

[cozylittleartblog]

i now understand how certain people felt when harpy eda was revealed 😳

prints here

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lap Pillow

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[quimser]

seized by the images

[reasonsforhope]

Humans are so cute. They think they can outsmart birds. They place nasty metal spikes on rooftops and ledges to prevent birds from nesting there.

It’s a classic human trick known in urban design as “evil architecture”: designing a place in a way that’s meant to deter others. Think of the city benches you see segmented by bars to stop homeless people sleeping there.

But birds are genius rebels. Not only are they undeterred by evil architecture, they actually use it to their advantage, according to a new Dutch study published in the journal Deinsea.

Crows and magpies, it turns out, are learning to rip strips of anti-bird spikes off of buildings and use them to build their nests. It’s an incredible addition to the growing body of evidence about the intelligence of birds, so wrongly maligned as stupid that “bird-brained” is still commonly used as an insult...

Magpies also use anti-bird spikes for their nests. In 2021, a hospital patient in Antwerp, Belgium, looked out the window and noticed a huge magpie’s nest in a tree in the courtyard. Biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra of Leiden-based Naturalis Biodiversity Center, one of the study’s authors, went to collect the nest and found that it was made out of 50 meters of anti-bird strips, containing no fewer than 1,500 metal spikes.

Hiemstra describes the magpie nest as “an impregnable fortress.”

Pictured: A huge magpie nest made out of 1,500 metal spikes.

Magpies are known to build roofs over their nests to prevent other birds from stealing their eggs and young. Usually, they scrounge around in nature for thorny plants or spiky branches to form the roof. But city birds don’t need to search for the perfect branch — they can just use the anti-bird spikes that humans have so kindly put at their disposal.

“The magpies appear to be using the pins exactly the same way we do: to keep other birds away from their nest,” Hiemstra said.

Another urban magpie nest, this one from Scotland, really shows off the roof-building tactic:

Pictured: A nest from Scotland shows how urban magpies are using anti-bird spikes to construct a roof meant to protect their young and eggs from predators.

Birds had already been spotted using upward-pointing anti-bird spikes as foundations for nests. In 2016, the so-called Parkdale Pigeon became Twitter-famous for refusing to give up when humans removed her first nest and installed spikes on her chosen nesting site, the top of an LCD monitor on a subway platform in Melbourne. The avian architect rebelled and built an even better home there, using the spikes as a foundation to hold her nest more securely in place.

...Hiemstra’s study is the first to show that birds, adapting to city life, are learning to seek out and use our anti-bird spikes as their nesting material. Pretty badass, right?

The genius of birds — and other animals we underestimate

It’s a well-established fact that many bird species are highly intelligent. Members of the corvid family, which includes crows and magpies, are especially renowned for their smarts. Crows can solve complex puzzles, while magpies can pass the “mirror test” — the classic test that scientists use to determine if a species is self-aware.

Studies show that some birds have evolved cognitive skills similar to our own: They have amazing memories, remembering for months the thousands of different hiding places where they’ve stashed seeds, and they use their own experiences to predict the behavior of other birds, suggesting they’ve got some theory of mind.

And, as author Jennifer Ackerman details in The Genius of Birds, birds are brilliant at using tools. Black palm cockatoos use twigs as drumsticks, tapping out a beat on a tree trunk to get a female’s attention. Jays use sticks as spears to attack other birds...

Birds have also been known to use human tools to their advantage. When carrion crows want to crack a walnut, for example, they position the nut on a busy road, wait for a passing car to crush the shell, then swoop down to collect the nut and eat it. This behavior has been recorded several times in Japanese crows.

But what’s unique about Hiemstra’s study is that it shows birds using human tools, specifically designed to thwart birds’ plans, in order to thwart our plans instead. We humans try to keep birds away with spikes, and the birds — ingenious rebels that they are — retort: Thanks, humans!

-via Vox, July 26, 2023

[kira-kun]

A or B?👀

[seathernycolors]

bird nerd !

[aveloka-draws]

Your watercolor stuff makes me want to get into it too, it looks so good! Do you use a specific watercolor brand?

;v; aaaa I hope you like them if you do!

When I wanted to start learning more about it I got a basic set from Royal Lagnickel with watercolors in tubes.

Lately I use Sakura Koi watercolors and my favorite✨✨✨ this set from Art Philosophy

[thatonegeekygirl]

shout out to the natural history museum ghost files episode for hauling me out of my school stress-induced artblock

[stellarmoth01]

Hi Slay the Princess people I return from the inktober void to bring you a handful of broken glass I hope you like it

Mixed media is really fun I really like how this one came out

Better sketch of my Narrator design under the cut cuz I forgot to take a picture of this one before I shattered him lmao

He’s so silly.. Tiny little nerd glasses

I based him off a raven, because I like imagining the voices as crows, and I wanted him to be noticeably different from them but yet still similar

[starflungwaddledee]

maybe a little bit generic of me, but i adore the dream land four!

magolor and bandee are tied for tippy top favourite, but this whole group just mean everything to me and i am extremely normal about them. after these guys it's probably a very close galacta knight and marx!

king dedede was actually my first ever played exposure to the franchise (through smash multiplayer at a party where i picked him due to Bird) and marx was my first 'character i recognised + played + was obsessed with outside the mains' in star allies so i still consider him my original Little Freak (affectionate)

ask answer for @trainerbob23!

[teaboot]

something I've been thinking a lot about lately is a question my sister asked me, and the knee-jerk response I didn't think about before saying out loud:

Her: "Do you think I'm annoying?"

Me: "If I didn't love you, yeah."

Because, after saying it, my first thought was "oh shit that was mean." And my second thought was, "it's true, though." And the third, immediate thought after that was, "why?".

If my best friend is making repetitive, meaningless noises for no reason, I love it. I love them. They're my weird little goofball. They're vibing. They're comfortable. They're being a weirdo. If a stranger sitting next to me on the bus does it, I close my eyes and put on my headphones and try not to hear them. Why is that?

What is it about loving someone that makes being "annoyed" an enjoyable experience? I love being "annoyed" by the people I love. I love being poked and teased and inconvenienced by people I love. So much so that it's not really an annoyance at all- it's not an annoyance because I'm not annoyed.

If I didn't care about you, I'd find you annoying. If I didn't like you, I'd find you annoying. If I hated you, I'd find you annoying. But I don't. I don't dislike you. I love you, and I feel that first.

So why am I so afraid of being annoying myself? Is it possible that the people who like me might like it? And is it possible that whoever doesn't was already a foregone conclusion? I don't know. I don't know

[ricky-mortis]

Howdy hello- guess who made a wings au :)

More to come with this eventually- I’m working on my designs for other characters at the moment, but for now we’ve got Red-Tailed Hawk for Curt and Eagle Owl for Owen.

For DMA I had Barn Owl wings because a) Barn Owls are beautiful and I wanted to draw the wings for them, and more importantly, b) Owen would probably want to disguise his wings, and it would make sense if it was as a different type of owl. I just assume he’d dye his feathers in some way or another. Look- just don’t think about it too much.