#and thats why birds do it

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[sluckythewizard]

FIIIINALLY almost nailed my designs for lizzie and caspian can i get a HEEEELLL YEAAH???? i think these two make a vvery cute duo and i cannt wait to see them again. i also hope they both get hurt reaaaallly really badly. togeter

[dragoncarrion]

I think part of what makes the recording of the last Kaua'i 'o'o so heart wrenching is the fact that thousands, maybe even millions of people have heard the song of that lonely bird, yet the one who that song was meant for never heard it and never will, because they were no more. He didn't know he was the last one calling out in vain

[chaotixx-stims]

gregory house stimboard with red, fire, and explosions for anon!

💉/🔥/💊

🔥/☆/🔥

���/🔥/💊

[puppppppppy]

Tell me about a song you like right now, maybe an animation you just watched that made you think thoughts and feel things

Only Acting by Kero Kero Bonito!! I want to make an animatic for Macaque using this song and some parts of Shadow Play and the s4 special.. although im still mapping it and deciding whether I want to use the radio edit or not lol

[abirddogmoment]

I love seeing Rory run in the field!! Bird dog doing bird dog things!! You said in the tags you had different training and priorities with her vs Mav re: offleash running like that. What kinds of things did you do differently with Rory to be comfortable having her offleash at a distance with reliable recall?

I was writing a whole novel but really it boils down to this chart. Under the cut because it's (vertically) long.

In short, it's just as much about what I didn't do with Maverick as what I did do with Aurora.

(Edited to add: I am extremely fortunate to live in the prairies where the kind of visibility I need is easy to find. Use my experience to inspire your own training if you like, but don't use it as a recipe. I have my own goals and my own priorities and those are likely different than yours.)

Maverick:

🔵 Supremely confident from day 1

🔵 Came home in August (extremely good and exciting time for outdoor adventures)

🔵 Prioritized specific sports behaviours over foundational building blocks like engagement and cooperation

🔵 Learned bad habits from my older dog at the time (prey drive > recall)

🔵 Was indiscriminately prey driven. If it moved, he wanted to kill it.

🔵 I phased out treats too fast and didn't want to use an ecollar or long line

🔵 I focused on "social media dog behaviours" (think like walking extremely close to me on trails) and got frustrated when we couldn't meet these rather than meeting my dog where he was at. This created a lot of frustration in our dog adventures.

🔵 I practiced recalls constantly when I didn't have to, making them a tedious behaviour for him. I would recall him 20-50 times a hike for everything from "you're too far away from me" to "I want to take a photo".

Aurora

🟣 Came to me a little insecure and looked to me for reassurance

🟣 Came home in December (a cold and relatively boring time for outdoor adventures)

🟣 I prioritized engagement, cooperation, and name recognition from day 1

🟣 Practiced good habits by walking offleash in the snow either alone or with Pike (amazing recall)

🟣 Is extremely birdy, but is very very focused. She easily calls off deer or people/dogs in the distance because she mostly cares about birds.

🟣 Literally always gets offered a high value snack for recalling or voluntary check ins (I will never phase this out, I will carry chunks of cheese on offleash walks for the rest of her life)

🟣 I never practice recalls if I don't need them. This one is hard to explain, but once Rory understood that long whistle = come back as fast as you can, I don't whistle unless I really need to. I recall her an average of 0-3 times per hike (*based on visibility or wildlife*) and trust her to make good decisions otherwise. I keep my eyeballs on her 100% of the time and choose areas with good visibility, but I don't recall her just for being far away.

🟣 I limit hikes where I have to nag her often (think, in the woods where I dont have a great line of sight and have to remind her to stay close to me) to a few times a month or less so she doesn't start getting frustrated about it.

🟣 I trust the training I put into her and choose to run her in areas with (relatively) reduced risk if she makes the "wrong" choice. I don't nitpick everything she does and I let her make her own choices, within reason.

🟣 I have an interrupter cue to ask her to stop doing something before I call her back (if she's digging a hole and I want her to move on, I use "Rory, enough! Here!") instead of whistling at her.

🟣 I don't force her attention on check ins. If she runs back to me and doesn't want a snack and wants to run straight back out, I let her run back out.

🟣 I have anticipatory cues for the end of a walk so I don't have to recall her when we get to the end of the field.

I want to say that it's nerve wracking to watch my dog sprint at full speed hundreds of yards away from me. I have to fight the impulse to recall her just because she's far away. It's an exercise in trust because I'm always worried about her going over the horizon, or running into a wildlife, or falling into a hole, but it's an important thing to work on if you have a dog that needs that trust to thrive.

Mav and I were a good team, but I never fully trusted him outdoors. I always had my finger on the ecollar buttons ready for him to do an evil and need to be vibrated. It was exhilarating to watch him in the field, but it wasn't really fun or relaxing.

Rory and I built a much stronger foundation of trust (I personally never would have been able to do this if I had more than one dog). She doesn't know any tricks yet, but I'm super confident in her recall and ability to take direction in the field, even when she's sprinting as fast as possible.

[maj0rmayhem]

Love when family dynamics are so horrible and horrific and awful but somehow despite it all there's still love there. and maybe it's twisted or it feels guilty because you KNOW you shouldn't love them but of course you do. love it even more when it pisses people off.

[vigilskeep]

at least in times of trouble i’ll always have the most nonsense aus my brain can provide

[rxttenfish]

Stole this from an anon; what fish would be improved with teeth, do you think? And which one would be better without any?

i think there should be a freshwater shark species with no teeth, preferably a parasite or a detritivore of some variety. something that most people would unilaterally agree is gross and preferably be more familiar with it than with all the oceanic species so that everyone will be surprised that the cool marine predators are actually just a version of this one. maybe something like the shark answer to the candiru, though maybe there are multiple species of these freshwater toothless sharks, and just one really small one ended up convergent with the candiru.

likewise because i go by all tetrapods being counted as fish (because ancestry is actually rather important to understanding anatomy and how species have evolved can tell you clues about how they will respond to other things in the future etc etc), i think more frogs should have the african bullfrogs' bone spikes. this will not make the world better but it will make it more interesting.

there should also be a species of betta that looks exactly like normal betta but with sharp little teeth in there. just to add some spice to the world. there should also be a type of pleco with teeth like a cookiecutter shark, everything else the same, that can also just creep up on other fish and take chunks out of them. maybe even a very small species of sturgeon too, especially if this lets them slurp up lamprey into a mouth like a lamprey.

i'd like to give seahorses teeth just because i'm curious where they'd put them. i'm imagining something like a cartoon grate, where if something gets forcibly pulled through it just comes out in meat chunks on the other side. even better if the teeth are fused top-to-bottom for this.

also i think there should be a species of parrotfish that retroactively lost their teeth. perhaps pufferfish too. mostly i'm curious what kinda niches they would end up in but also as a nice contrast to how weird those types of fish are to begin with. i like the compounding weirdness. i think there should be more freaks^2. i also think there should be a species of rodent that also has an entirely toothless sucking mouth, and they can be convergent with the fish too, or otherwise just nicely parallel their existence.

[creaturefeaster]

How do you manage to take care of all those animals and still have time to do color quest? This may be the half time day job in me talking but I feel like I don't have time to do any of my hobbies with the 6 animals I have

I try my hardest to make some time.

The bird pens are set up so that, aside from daily feeding, and cleaning of the geeses water and pool, they do not need to be heavily maintained. I clean out their runs and pens more often in the wetter months, so I have less time in the fall and spring... Those days I can be outside for a couple hours at least. But the daily tasks don't take more than maybe 20 minutes. Sunny days I let them free range so I have to supervise because of eagles and hawks, so that can take another couple hours out of my day.

But I have that system, so I often have a lot of time inside. I have a dog to walk and feed, I spend at least a couple of hours in the kitchen cleaning and making food throughout the day, I have other stuff to manage in the house, I do commission work and I help my husband with projects for his haunted house. I'm actually very behind on some smaller things I need to take care of, but that's life, because somewhere I need to stop and indulge in my hobbies, lol.

Almost every drawing you see from me, are all that I have time to do. There is very little in terms of drawings that go unshared, so you guys basically get every morsel I have time to produce. I'm lucky, in a way, that I spent my time growing up learning how to draw fast, otherwise I'd never get anything done.

One factor in having just enough time to doodle or write a little, is that my work is commission work and I can dictate how much free time I have, basically. The other factor is that my husband makes enough to support us both right now. If I had a job outside of the house, I would probably not have time for CQ. That, or I wouldn't have time for healthy meals or keeping clean. Considering I have stomach disabilities, I'd rather eat well and sit clean than draw if it came down to it. Luckily I don't need to choose between those, at least not right now.

[turgidmuff]

his dumb stupid face when he has muffleys undivided attention

[semothekat]

me when im crazy about two characters that dont even know each other.

Thank you to @oathofkaslana for writing the id for this!!

[savage-rhi]

😭😂

[cathalbravecog]

junior!! their design isn't fully decided on yet but i rlly care abt them so i drew them ! they're a very young cog outside of cogs inc and cassie's child (thus, belle's grand grand child). they are an iphone ipad baby. they are very autistic about birds :]

and yes they would walk up to you and say "you're so skibidi!!!!!!!!!!!"

[hana-bobo-finch]

tis here!! My stupid little beta pdbc comic!! UHHHHH

additional ramblings because I don’t know how to stop yapping:

I know the ending is extremely abrupt but honestly? I can’t even lie I think it’s funnier and somehow more in character that way. There is no way in hell he’d question what just happened he’d just lay on the floor and say “alas!” As if that is in any way is a proper response to what just happened. So no apologies for that, I genuinely think the ending is amazing and won’t hear anything else. Alas.

I WAS REALLY SCREWED OVER WITH THE TEN IMAGE MOBILE LIMIT SO THE PACING IS VERY IFFY!! That alongside the fact I wanted to get this out as quickly as possible to gauge opinions and such—therefore making this much less detailed than I’d like to have made it, yes that’s my own fault I know—means that I couldn’t properly show what the briar zome is like (HEARTBREAKING). It’s a lot more spacious and unending than what’s shown here. In this it only looks like you’re there for a few minutes but experiences there can last up to a week. There are also a lot more thorns and spiked vines, it’s just that, like I said, I wanted to get this posted quickly and coloring in all of those spikes probably took more time than some of the drawings themselves. Had I made this as accurate to canon as possible, it would be much more visually cluttered. The briar zome is VERY hard to traverse because almost everything is covered in thorns (hence the name). Also worth noting that although it’s seemingly wintry there, there’s no actual temperature in the briar zome which is why pumpkin daddy is not fucking freezing to death (you have to look DAPPER when you’re illegally eating crabs)

This technically isn’t canon. This is a mishmash of all of the stuff I have about the briar zome, but in canon it’s all much more spread out, e.g. the eyes weren’t discovered until a few trips in when they actually bothered trying to figure out if/where the briar zome ends, in which BAM they found a buncha eyes!! Speaking of the eyes, their official names are Sotes, and where they’re found is called the “Eyes Rink” (GET IT!!! EYES!!! ICE!!! GET I-💥💥💥)

you’re probably wondering what the Miika chimp incident is, which is a fair thing to be wondering, however I will not be elaborating because I think it’s funnier that way. sorry (I am not at all sorry)

AND THE TIIIIIIME yes indeed the time works differently there. As one could. Probably guess by the wack-ass watch positions. The briar zome does in fact have its own time system that’s displayed differently than most would be used to. Alas, I had to cut that part short because I realized I was quickly running out of pages and I really wanted space to draw some of those beautiful beautiful eyeballs. I has this whole lecture about different types of watch hand designs and their names but that was unfortunately cut for time (ironically)

anyway uh. hope this was somewhat enjoyable? *EXPLODES*

[medicalunprofessional]

sorry for greebleposting but you should download stimuli with me.