#and i tag that only to get the weird christian nerds with me :D

[strawberriesinmoominvalley]

tatooine slave culture has ar-amu. the mortis gods are canon. this gives across the implication that most planets an idea of the force as a deity

anyway so this shows that within the star wars universe belief in the light (god, if you will) is inherent, as within all people the acceptance for god is inherent. in this essay i will

[tracle0]

hey hello hi SO here's the deal I legit adore all your bird facts and your tag rambles n whenever I see them I'm like "!!!!!!" so I wanted to ask you a Bird Question so I get to hear more rambles but I don't know enough about birds to ask anything that sounds smart SO if this is not a weird request maybe could I please have some words about... 1) a Weird Bird, 2) a Cool Bird and 3) a bird you would most like to be bros with. sorry if this is a super weird ask ahaha ok cya later have a good day

HI HELLO you actually read those??? omg that very much makes me v happy to hear I just like to throw up knowledge into the tags and then assume no-one is gonna ever observe it. 

Wowza. Secret fan right here :D

Okay okay birds. Biiiirds. I gotchya man. Lots of my college project has been looking into birds. I know birds. 

However, I do live in England where there aren’t many weird birds. Our birds are kinda tame. I guess the tiny birds are kinda weird. I’ll give you some tiny bird facts. 

European robins are very shy little birds, very wary and cautious around people in most of Europe. Here is one of them;

Little fat lad. In most of Europe, v shy. However! In England, they are super bold. Very daring. Very commonly seen in gardens and allotments, waiting for gardeners to finish digging at a patch to go rummaging for bugs and other things they can eat. This is because in England, it’s considered bad luck to kill robins (don’t ask why I couldn’t find out) so they’re v safe here. 

They were called Robin Red Breast for a while, due to... red. Postmen in Victorian England also wore red around winter time, as part of their uniform, so a popular nickname for postmen in winter was Robin Red Breast. It became a sign of Christmas coming, hence why robins are so strongly associated with Christmas despite being year-round visitors. The last bit of their name was dropped but the sentiment remains. 

Other small bird facts; Goldfinches! V pretty birds. Here’s a picture

Wow look at that bird, so pretty! So, the deal with goldfinches was that they have super sweet song. I can hear one outside right now, actually, v tuneful, v recognisable songbirds. As a result, for a lot of history, goldfinches have been caught to keep as cage birds, to sing away and make rich lords and ladies houses sound nice. Rude practise. 

People think their population has been declining and blame the magpie. You’re Australian so maybe you’re like ‘reeee magpie’ (although my brain is telling me you don’t hate them and think they’re bros correct me if I’m wrong) but here magpies are mostly disliked because of their habit of taking from nests - a behaviour common to many corvids (more on that later). However! There have been lots of studies into this, and it was found that areas with higher magpie populations had no correlation to the number of songbird deaths in the area. Almost like... industrialisation and farming are driving them out of their area. 

These are long rambles. There are two info-splurges on tiny birds. Let’s move on to a cool bird, the swift! The common swift. Just to be clear.

I fucking adore swifts. Every year I wait eagerly for May to roll around so they return to England again. They are delightful birds, even if their screams are a bit unnerving. In Medieval times, people used to think their screams were the screams of damned souls in hell, and that when swifts vanished during the winter, they were buried in the mud to sleep, a belief held due to their nest-building habits of dried mud being the main item used to build nests.

Swifts barely ever land!! The only exception to this is to feed their chicks. When they’re little chicks, they do press-ups with their wings to build up wing muscles, Once they leave the nest, they keep flying for most of their life, only stopping when THEY have chicks!!! They eat, sleep and mate on the wing!!! Wild man!! 

As said before in the tags that I think you read, they rarely fly in the rain when in England/Europe - they fly to eat the bugs, and the bugs hide when it rains, so they just.... fly around the storm. They’re the only bird to actually do this. Unrelated but also neat, they’re one of the oldest species of birds, and whilst they look like swallows and house martins, they’re most closesly related to the hummingbird!!!

Swifts have the fastest level flying speed of 69mph. This means that it has the fastest speed it achieves by itself - the fastest bird of all is the peregrine falcon with its dive breaking speeds of 240mph!! That’s wild. They also keep flying for the longest, as said, and fly the furthest, from Africa to Europe and back again every year. One swift was recorded flying 4 million miles in its life - the same as travelling to the moon and back 8 times!!! Crazy. Insane. I love swifts. 

Bird I would most like to be bros with is the crow 100% because. Hello. Have we met. I love crows. Carrion crows, because they’re the crow we have here the most. 

There they are!!! V pretty. I love them. So much. 

So! Carrion crows often get a bad wrap for a variety of reasons, mostly history based, which is what I was actually exploring in the funky crow comic I’ve been doing for college work. I will say I blame Christianity and Alfred Fucking Hitchcock for their demonisation the most. They’re actually bros, being able to recognise human faces, reward those who are nice to it and punish those who are cruel. They can also tell other crows which humans are good and bad.

As said previously, a lot of corvids attack nests and eat eggs or young of other birds. I can’t defend this much - it’s what corvids do. Hell, the local crow in our area recently attacked the jackdaw nest across the road. It happens. C’est la vie. They do this because they’re scavengers, opportunistic, eating anything and everything they can, which is most likely how they’ve adapted so well to the huge industrial boom and in so many different places around the world!

In Japan, the Kanji for ‘crow’ is the same as the Kanji for ‘bird’, except the bit that symbolises the eye is removed. This is because crows, being all black with beady black eyes, look like they don’t have eyes from a distance. I learnt that from Persona 5. 

Their brains are huge!! Smart boyos!!! Hell, in terms of brain to body mass, their brains are bigger than apes!!! They’re insanely good at problem solving, with wild crows who were kept in captivity for short periods for testing being able to solve multi-step problems (some problems being 8 steps long!) for food!!! They’ve also been seen playing around with each other and the environment, something that had only been seen in apes and other high-intelligence and social creatures. They recognise their reflection. They have been observed making tools in the wild. They are very smart. 

Crows have really interesting routines and behaviours they follow regarding death - when finding a dead crow, they sound the alarm, and all swarm around the body, working together to try and figure out how it died and if it’s a threat to all of them. Sometimes they lay things on the dead crow, which some believe is similar to burying. If you’re interested in this, Kaeli Swift is a good name to look into - she specialises in corvid behaviour. 

My head is now going blank with crow facts but I think there are more. Support your local corvid nerd. Support your local bird nerd! Didn’t know I had so many facts rattling in my head. 

This uhhhh got long. If you got to the end, thumbs up 10/10 appreciate. Hope you have a top tier day :D

[followerofmercy]

@unexpected-profundity tagged me for 20 questions :D

I would like to tag @trifoyle and @vass-rieh, if you guys want to

1. Nickname

I tend to just respond to whatever people yell in my direction, so I go by Reagan and Morgan semi-frequently. I also love the really friggen weird ones that have nothing to do with my actual name, like Crystal, Storm and Ms. Albright. (Mr. Albright was a teacher that recently retired, and as far as I’m aware, did not have a wife or children).   I also respond to “hey you,” “NERD,” “lady,” etc, and went by Dragon when I had my old username.

2. Gender

F

3. Meyers-Briggs

INFP HELL YEAH. However, I’m only like... 3% more introverted than extroverted. I can do both and it is extremely helpful. 

4. Height

5′5″

5. Favorite features

I’m assuming physical features, so my hair and skin tone. I’m white AF with friggen anime-length brown hair. Seriously, my hair is loooong. I colored it a few months ago to give it a reddish undertone and darken it a few shades. (I can also wear anything except white or flesh tones, which is nice)

6. Favorite color

Red and gray! Red is so powerful and symbolic, blood and love and rage, etc, while gray is subtle and you can do so, so much with it. I love the sheer amount of color on overcast days, all the different blue-grays in the clouds. It’s only dreary if you don’t know what to look for. 

7. Favorite animal

Uhhhhhh. Hard to pick? Tossup between cuttlefish, elephant and giraffe, leaning towards cuttlefish. Soft genius bois. 

8. Average hours spent sleeping

At current work or at college, 6-8 hours. When on vacation, 8-10. I get kinda lethargic on vacations. I don’t like it.

9. Dogs or cats

Dogs are superior work animals, cats make better pets. They’re better at entertaining themselves when I’m busy. 

10. Morning or evening person? 

Hard to say? I think I define this differently than most people. I consider “morning people” people that can function right out of bed - they don’t need an hour to “wake up,” and I fall in that category. Once I’m up, I’m up and moving (makes me great for jobs where I’m on-call during sleeping hours - like my current job). However, I vastly prefer being awake later in the day and I hit a second wind at night without fail. 

11. Dream trip?

Piranha fishing in the Amazon, checkin’ out bugs and fungi in Australia, or fishing in Alaska. 

12. Dream job?

Something meaningful? I’m trying to get in with a prison ministry organization stationed around here, though apparently I love kids? I honestly didn’t expect that? This camp counselor thing is great. ANYWAY. I want something where I make a difference to people, ideally working with individuals, and maybe where my science background is relevant. (OH I LOVE COOKING - I also really want to open a candy shop. Currently working on that with my mother.)

13. When did you make this account?

Uh. Dunno? Sometime? And like unexpected-profundity said, I have no issue with people digging all the way back into my posts. I don’t think that’s creepy at all. This is an archive of things I choose to share, not my diary. 

14. How many followers do you have?

HOLY POOP WHEN DID I GET 49?! Uhhhh hi and thanks. I also have an askblog for my original story @askwordsworthconsolas but I have done literally nothing with it yet. Gonna reblog all the oc asks I do over there eventually. Someday. 

15. How many pets do you have?

My dad has a dog, I have a cat and five chickens, as well as innumerable fish in our koi pond/self-sustaining ecosystem thing. When I live somewhere that allows pets, I get random toads or lizards from the wild, let them chill out in my terrarium for a week until I get bored of them, then return them to the wild. I hatched some eggs from an anole once. 

16. Best place to visit in your country?

I highly recommend the Great Lakes, specifically Lake Huron. Beautiful, dangerous expanse of water, lots of fish. 

17.  Favorite ice cream flavor?

Vanilla tbh. I really, really like vanilla everything. 

18. How often do you read?

Haaaaaaa I feel called out. When I was younger and had more free time and less things that I wanted to actively learn, I read all the friggen time. 4-6 hours a day. Now... not so much. I like writing better? 

19. Favorite study locations

Somewhere quiet and away from others. I can NOT study in a group. I typically end up in my room. 

20. Favorite book series? 

Young Wizards series by Diane Duane. Very nuanced for a young adult series, lots of mature concepts without making things too grim dark and cynical. Actually, it’s not cynical at all. It’s all about persevering in the face of inevitable loss because every person, every second is WORTH IT. (I’m also like 99% sure there’s a lot of Christian subtext in it, with the forgiveness and the love and the redemption arcs of so many people.) But! It’s not, like, super glaring. I like it because it resonates with me, but it’s not obvious.