#Stretchers

[shiftythrifting]

No comment.

[fitsofgloom]

Seems Like A Stretch of The Imagination

[gladdybloom]

I'm just in love with these dangle stretchers ❤️

[ohnoicantstoptumbling]

Over grown emo.

After 9 years of having long hair, I cut it all off at the start of November. I absolutely hate me with short hair so I'm happy to see the length coming back through 😊

[jackfrostboi]

I got a neon light finally my life is complete

[montereybayaquarium]

How do you train a fish??

Join us on a journey from wee fry to terrific titans and learn how our aquarists train our giant sea bass 🐟💪😍

[kedreeva]

Okay so, I don't think I've spoken of the saga here yet but! Gather round. I shall tell you a long story about the bird I just acquired and why she is VERY IMPORTANT.

At the beginning of last fall, I started looking into quail genetics a little more, because I got tired of not being able to sex my Celadon quail by their feathers. Originally I thought I could kill 2 birds (ok maybe more) with 1 stone and order nice jumbo wild type (which MANY places advertised as wild type jumbo) hatching eggs, and this would help me put some size on the Celadons (jumbo) while also making them feather sexable (wild type). Perfect!

But then I come to find out that pretty much all jumbo lines are jumbo BROWNS, as in they all have the sex linked brown (SLB) gene. So, I was a little confused and a LOT annoyed because I wanted to work specifically with the wild type color/pattern. No mutations just straight, plain wild type.

And EVERYWHERE I looked - major production hatcheries, private breeders through websites, Facebook groups, local swaps, craigslist, e v e r y w h e r e -

People ONLY had SLB.

This spring I came across a video showing about the differences between SLB and wild type and I figured if the person who made it can tell, maybe she will have some. So I looked her up (not in a stalker way, her farm name was stamped on the video and took me to the website), and what luck! She was in Michigan! Upper Michigan, so still a hike, but not California, y'know?

So I shot her an email and explained that I was looking for WT and that her site said she bred them and that people could do local pickup. She responded yeah she's totally got a bunch! And I said great, I'm also in Michigan, albeit far away, but I don't mind driving 7+ hours each way, because I really need actual, trusted WT for sure birds for my celadon project, can I come pick them up?

Cue the most frankly bizarre email chain in my short life. As soon as I mentioned that I was going to drive, or perhaps that I had a genetics plan in place, she got super sketchy and started saying how she hadn't really paid as close attention to SLB vs. WT, that it mattered less than she thought it would when she started, that I shouldn't focus on that either, and also that "fawn celadon is practically unheard of" in the hobby and "you should focus on a clean Tibetan because it's hard to find without roux in it) implying that I should concentrate on those things instead. And concluded by telling me if I really want WT, to contact this other person (why happens to be someone I can't stand). It all sounded VERY much like she didn't have wild type males, after all, and had thought I didn't know the difference so it wouldn't actually matter. But, it does. It actually matters a lot to me.

So I messaged back to say, well, I don't want to do any of those things, I specifically want to work with this set of genetics and you said you have them so I shouldn't have to go to anyone else??

And then she went radio silent for a week. I kind of figured I'd called a bluff, and that she was one of dozens of people I'd contacted who'd said they had WT only to find out they had SLB. I get that it's difficult to see the difference, but this particular person was the president of the American Coturnix Breeders Association or whatever (found out it's actually just a club formed by her and her friends a year ago, so not as impressive as it sounds, considering they don't actually DO anything- no putting on shows, no newsletters, no certifications, no public breeder directory, no finished SOP, nada), so I kind of expected she should know what she's talking about, if anyone does.

Eventually, after a week, she responded that she had been judging at a county fair, but she had a few heterozygous males (WT het roux, which is fine) and she could set a hatch for me for more if I wanted to come at the end of the month, but she's in WI now, not MI. I said sure, since where she was in WI was actually closer than where she'd been in the UP, and we arranged date/time.

The day of, my neighbor friend, Jude, comes with me for company/keeping me awake through the 15 hours driving round trip. It's a pleasant enough drive. We arrived at a cutesy little house on the edge of town that looks like anyone's house in a neighborhood, with a spacious lawn. The person meets us and takes me around the side of the house to a 6x6x1.5 or so chicken tractor, where she's got some male coturnix. She pulls the available males for me to look through and... fam, they ALL looked SLB, to me.

Now, she swore to me up and down that they couldn't be anything except WT het for roux, because of the way she is breeding them. But I've put these birds next to my SLB males and if I didn't have my males banded, I would not ever have told the difference between them. I still picked up 4 of them, because I will give it a go- worst case, I can produce plain Roux hens/plain Roux males for use in breeding later, best case they do actually produce WT hens and they just LOOK SLB and I have to figure out what the differences are. I don't want to leave without seeing her hens, which she has told me are all WT (which is why the males HAVE to be het for it), and she takes me back. Now the hens, the hens are easy to see the difference. White bellies first of all, but the chest feathers are also wildly different! The shafts are white, the dot around the shaft is dark, ringed in red, ringed in white. On an SLB, the shafts aren't white, it's just a black dot surrounded in a red feather, and the belly is all red/buff/cream, not white.

This is what an SLB hen looks like:

So I take a nice long look to memorize the color, and thank her for showing me and meeting, and we head back home.

I do fecals when I get home because all of the males are VERY thin, no meat on them at all, and since she said she'd been feeding Purina (garbage for fowl feeds), I figured that was why, but no- HUGE coccidia loads in all of them. So I treated them and got them on a better feed. They immediately began putting on meat, and they're find now.

The rest of this summer, I have spent going to local bird swaps and inspecting all of the quail I could find, hoping to find one (1) actual wild-type phenotype bird. Hundreds and hundreds of birds, I have pawed through them all, being super obnoxious to the owners I'm sure, holding and inspecting males. I found ONE suspected WT male (and this is a HUGE "suspected," he could very well be SLB with low red expression). I compared him when I got home and I'm doubting myself still, so I don't know if I will ever actually pair him with the SLB hens or if I'll just wait til I have a roux set.

Regardless, it's been a dry season for getting what I want. It's been a dry YEAR. Yesterday was another swap and more hundreds of quail and me pawing through all of them.

Until.

My eyes landed upon.... her.

If you've only lived in an area that has american crows and not ravens, you find yourself wondering if crows are ravens. You see a big crow and you think wow! maybe that is a raven! It could be a crow, but it's seems bigger so maybe it's a raven. But, if you take a trip to a place with ravens, and you see one for the first time, you realize that there is no question, when you see a raven. When you see a raven in person, there's no question and not only is there no question, you wonder how you could ever have thought a crow was a raven. It's laughable, while looking at the raven.

That's how finding this bird felt. I'd been picking up every SLB hen and going maybe this is actually WT? It could be SLB but maybe it's WT? But the second I laid eyes on her in the middle of a pack of SLB with some mixed colors, I knew I was looking at WT hen, and I can't imagine how I ever thought maybe an SLB hen was WT.

Here's a better photo of her chest and belly (she's beat UP from her previous home, the back of her head and most of her rump are plucked clean from males). You can see the white shafts and the white belly.

And some other pics of her, showing the grey-brown on her side and back- VERY different than the SLB hens

I can't express how stoked I am about this bird. This is the first time after a LOT of effort and time, that I have felt confident I am holding the bird I want.

She's also the indicator that I have a LOT of work ahead of me.

My end goal is to have birds that look like her, weigh 12-14oz, and lay large, blue eggs. I have birds that lay large, blue eggs, I have birds that weigh 12-14oz live weigh, and now I have at least 1 bird that looks like her, which means I can make more that look like her. The first step is cleaning the color mutations out of the celadon line without losing the celadon eggs. This is going to be a bit of a nightmare, BUT, I have a friend helping me out with getting a few celadons that are either WT or SLB (I'm guessing SLB all things considered) to start the work with. I will work over the winter to get a few more actual WT birds here, and to start crossing out the celadons with the SLB jumbos to clean out the other feather color mutations. Once I'm down to just SLB and celadon for mutations, I can clean the SLB out with the WT and roux lines.

This project will likely take me a good 2 years, maybe 3, to complete and then test breed to ensure I haven't lost the celadon gene and I don't have any hidden recessives lingering about. But just having the fucking materials to do it all on hand now is a huge step forward from where I was when I decided to start the project.

[syl16]

Winslow I drew just now to avoid studying (❤‿❤)

[nullphysics]

[gladdybloom]

[laxibbeb]

azriel in stirrup leggings 🗣️🗣️🗣️

\/ there is more under the read more \/

i referenced an evan peters photo for the last one and he had a rat and i thought ha! imagine if azriel had a rat

please tell me your name ideas for azriel's rat

[pcktknife]

junko doodle

[aceofwhump]

Clips of 9-1-1 6x11 from this sneak peek video

A/N: I made these really quick and it was hard to hear what the dialogue was so I apologize if I got it wrong but hey when the episode airs I'm gonna gif it again anyway lol. I think this episode is actually making me insane. I have gone feral for this whump and I'm not sorry 🤣 I'm never made gifs so fast in my life.

[smalltimidbean]

Blast of Many Little Guys Upon You;

[jokeanddaggerdept]

[kedreeva]

This is Eris (left, 2020) and her younger half-brother, Bismuth (right, 2023)

This is Citrine (left, 2023) and her full brother, Bismuth (right, 2023)

I've talked a lot about how breeding and care matters so hugely to these birds, but I think this is a really obvious example.

When it comes to choosing breeders, 99.9999% of breeders I've seen and spoken to are mainly looking at the males and how pretty their colors are, and largely ignoring the hens. "Any" hen will do- I RARELY see people being choosy. Maybe they don't know how to be, maybe they think it doesn't matter - the hens are not as flashy, so what difference could there really be? - maybe they just don't care, maybe it's hard to find nice ones anyway because people don't care. I don't know. Once in a while I see people going gaga over a nice spalding hen with a lot of color on her, but by and large, they're ignored.

These three birds share a father. Indie is a beautiful boy, and he held his color very well, but honestly his train carriage left a lot to be desired and he was pretty small compared to my own birds. Regardless, he made a few really nice kids, including Amber (Bug), Bismuth, and Citrine (The Trio). He also fathered Eris, Opal, and Onyx, though not with my hens and not on property.

And here's where we get to the point. This is Eris' mom, Sasha:

And here is The Trio's mom, Aurora:

Sasha was itty bitty, with a small head, and very short legs. She also didn't have particularly good color- almost none, if I'm being honest, and her train carriage was Not Great. Aurora, on the other hand, while not as leggy as her offspring (which is partially due to feed... I raised her from 3mo old 15 years ago when 'game bird feed' didn't exist and the recommended "best" feed option was chicken layer feed mixed with kitten chow... atrocious by today's standards), still has pretty good type and excellent color. She typically carries her train high, she's spurred, she's Big. She's also an EXCELLENT mother and broody.

On top of having Sasha for a mom, Eris was raised in a brooder, and later in a small pen, and on feed that was 18% protein (instead of the 26-30% they should be on). She didn't have the space early on to use her leg and wing muscles, and it shows in her type. Even though i got her when she was just a couple of months old, those first few months are crucial to their development. Feed and environment can only go so far though.

Anyway, you can see the difference in breeding and care here. Eris is short, stout, short necked, and her rump curves down. Her face, particularly her beak length, is short like her mother's. It's hard to see in the photo, but I assure you her neck lacing is thick/muddy. In contrast, Citrine has thin, clean lacing, she's nearly as leggy as her brother, her neck has richer and more purple color, and her rump does not curve down- you can see the bend where her tail begins and is held down. She's also quite slender/racy in body type, like a good game bird should be, rather than heading toward the stout body type of domestication.

I can tell people that hen choice and care/environment matters until I'm blue in the face, but honestly, I think having comparison photos really brings it home.