tinylongwing

[tinylongwing]

There will be a 24-hour economic blackout in the USA on Friday, February 28th.

No purchases, no spending.

We are resisting a fascist regime, and need to spread the message.

Nationwide Economic Blackout on February 28: List of Stores Being Targeted - Newsweek

[tinylongwing]

Here's my final full chart for this winter's cast of unusual characters.

I document the individual intergrade (and otherwise unusual) Northern Flickers that turn up in my yard. This winter had some returnees plus a bunch of new faces!

Intergrades are a mix between subspecies, as opposed to hybrids, which would be a mix of different species. More info on intergrade flickers here!

[tinylongwing]

I'm too tired to do anything very creative so I decided today I'd just work on understanding the shading on the planes of the face, using the model I am contractually obliged to keep using until I get all 20 done.

6/20

[tinylongwing]

Here's my final full chart for this winter's cast of unusual characters.

I document the individual intergrade (and otherwise unusual) Northern Flickers that turn up in my yard. This winter had some returnees plus a bunch of new faces!

Intergrades are a mix between subspecies, as opposed to hybrids, which would be a mix of different species. More info on intergrade flickers here!

[tinylongwing]

I'm too tired to do anything very creative so I decided today I'd just work on understanding the shading on the planes of the face, using the model I am contractually obliged to keep using until I get all 20 done.

6/20

[tinylongwing]

Sorry if this is nosy, but I was wondering how exactly you got into the research work you're currently doing, it's similar to the career I am hoping to have in a few years and was wondering if you have any tips on what to focus on/do in order to get job opportunities and the such.

Hey, I'm always happy to answer questions like this!

I started off by doing a bunch of internships in and after college, all on projects I was interested in. It's a great way to not only get stuff on your CV for future jobs, but probably even more important is that it lets potential future employers meet you. Name recognition is huge - if you did an internship with an organization (like a conservation nonprofit) and they have a job opening for, say, the supervisor position for that internship, you are WAY more likely to get it if you did the internship than if you're an applicant they don't know anything about past a CV.

But also, don't feel completely married to your first job (unless it turns out to be a perfect fit - then great!). Get something good enough that will give you stable income and benefits, and after doing that for a year or two, you can always look for something else.

Being willing to travel is another extremely crucial help in this field, at least in the US. Look at job offerings in multiple states, and be willing to get yourself to the job. It's not easy or cheap, which sucks and can be limiting - and obviously in the current US climate, if that's where you are, limiting yourself to states you're willing to live in can be hugely important.

The two most important job boards for these kinds of internships, as well as for long term jobs eventually, are:

Texas A&M Wildlife Jobs

Ornithology Exchange

Both are somewhat global though most positions are for the US and Canada. And while there are positions posted all year round, most internships will be for spring through fall, and most summer jobs are posted in November-December, so to have the most options you'll want to be thinking at least 6-8 months ahead when searching for positions.

Also, if you're in the US, I'm so sorry. I am too. Science positions are likely to drop off a cliff shortly here - many have already disappeared due to the cuts to federal funding for science. Call your senators and attend the 50501 protests.

If you're not in the US, probably don't come here if you can help it. I wouldn't want to. The job market is about to get excruciatingly tight, and a lot of us are probably looking for ways out.

But if you're stuck here with the rest of us, persist and fight.

[tinylongwing]

Don't try this at home (you might lose a hand)

5/20

[tinylongwing]

Don't try this at home (you might lose a hand)

5/20

[tinylongwing]

This is excessively self-indulgent

Edit: Sure I'll add in the text I wound up putting in reblogs. I didn't think people would enjoy it as much as you all are - thank you, haha.

---

Rigo steals that cigarette from Dale and draws a lungful of smoke from it, just like he'd done when the two of them were young and stupid, sharing stolen cigarettes swiped from the corner store. Honestly, years ago that should have been his first clue, but then again, stupid and giddy together is how they always have been anyway, and -- oh, fuck it.

What do you want it to mean?

"I think, compa, I want to kiss you. Just not here."

Not in the bar, not in public. The words are practically whispered, and then Rigo puts the cigarette back in Dale's lips and smiles.

[tinylongwing]

When I die, I'm comin' right on back for you, valentine.

[tinylongwing]

Centrocercus urophasianus - Lauren Helton

For Month of Love 2019: Blindness

While many birds use sound to attract mates, the Greater Sage Grouse provides a dramatic example of the use of acoustics. Males gather in leks and their complex series of booms, pops, and whistles produced in part by the males’ inflatable air sacs which are exposed during the dancing ritual. Females rely on these strange sounds to locate males across broad expanses of sagebrush and desert grasses, and judge them based on the quality of their acoustics.

[tinylongwing]

Fishentines

[tinylongwing]

Music recs list for my fellow Vide Noir-heads

(And everyone else too)

I've often seen, and even echoed the sentiment, that Lord Huron's album Vide Noir is completely unique. Nobody else is putting out big concept indie rock albums about existential dread in an uncaring and horrifying cosmos when you're just trying to look for the girlfriend who ghosted you and you wind up deep in a Los Angeles neo-noir involving eldritch space drugs and hallucinations from across time and space, okay? That's fair.

BUT.

While none of the below are the same, I do think they're likely to scratch some of that itch while you wait for more. Please check them out! You might find something you like. All of the below are bands that release concept albums meant to be listened to from start to finish, so I'll be recommending whole albums, not singles. Also these are youtube links because that's what I use but you can for sure find all of these everywhere you get music.

Typhoon

Criminally underrated for way too long. Huge sweeping orchestral indie rock sounds that would be right at home if a movie was made of one of their albums (what a dream that would be). Most of their music is inspired by a combination of the works of David Lynch and the frontman/writer's personal battles with Lyme disease and his subsequent near death. Listen to EVERYTHING they have put out ever, but especially:

Offerings (2018): According to the band, "It's a record from the perspective of a mind losing its memory at precisely the same time the world is willfully forgetting its history. The urgent question becomes: without causality, without structures of meaning, without essential features of rational thought, is there anything that can save us from violence/oblivion?

With no past and no future, there is only suffocating, annihilating, present, looping on and on ad infinitum (to me, one plausible definition of hell) and the best you can hope for is that somewhere in the void there exists some small, irreducible certainty—a fragment, a kernel, something—that you may have the good fortune to stumble upon before it's all over.

You know, a boy/girl-meets-girl/boy-everyone-dies-in-botched-attempt-at-neo-pagan-sacrificial-ritual-on-global-scale kind of thing."

White Lighter (2013): More directly inspired by Morton's survival of Lyme disease and organ failure, about finding hope when things feel utterly hopeless, and his gratitude toward his father for saving his life via kidney donation. (There is a 10th anniversary version of this album that includes some unrelated singles that were never released on albums, fyi - I find they interrupt the flow of the original intended release).

Arcade Fire

Oscillating between dance pop and indie orchestral folk-rock-baroque pop, these guys are pretty well known (The Suburbs won the Grammy for best album of 2010, after all). But! If you haven't heard them, or if you forgot they existed, this is a really really excellent time to listen to their work.

The Suburbs (2010): If you're going to start anywhere with this band, start here. Stay here a while. Inspired by some of the band members' upbringings in suburbian Texas, the album is an apocalyptic journey through end-stage capitalism and it's fucking jawdropping.

mewithoutYou

Post-hardcore/art rock band that incorporates spirituality and religion-as-myth and history from viewpoints around the world in order to write incredibly moving music about the human condition.

Ten Stories (2012): Inspired by multiple similar real world events from the 19th and early 20th centuries, this album is about a traveling circus on a train that crashes in 19th-century Montana, and the journeys of the circus animals as they flee the wreckage, or try to rebuid their own societies. Gorgeous, desolate, heartbreaking.

Pale Horses (2015): Visions of the apocalypse from the perspectives of multiple world mythologies as well as from the personal perspective of the narrator observing the ruin in his own life and the city around him.

Freelance Whales

The greatest tragedy here is these folks no longer make music - one member left the band, another has passed away. Thankfully, they put out two gorgeous indie folk-pop concept albums first that I think any Lord Huron fan should listen to. Read the descriptions, you'll see why.

Weathervanes (2010): While not all songs on this album are directly linked, many of them are, and those songs follow the narrative of a boy whose family moves into an old house that turns out to be haunted. He falls in love with the ghost who lives there, and winds up killing himself to be with her - and finds he has no regrets, for life is short anyway.

Diluvia (2012): Heavily inspired by Battlestar Galactica and stories of ancient aliens, this is the tale of a distant civilization which collapses from a combination of natural disasters and perhaps their own hubris. A few of them manage to escape on a starship, and eventually discover Earth and its ancient pre-humans. The dying aliens seed the Earth with their own DNA in order to preserve the genetic traces of their once-existence.

[tinylongwing]

Holy shit!!!!! Idk who Lord Huron is (that and the others going on the list now) but that post just DEEPLY dislodged Freelance Whales from my subconscious and im listening to it now and 14 again!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wow!!!!! Thank you!!!

Oh man!! Haha, I found out about them because they opened for Fanfarlo at the Doug Fir Lounge in 2010 and they blew me away. Incredible show to have those two back to back. I'm so so SO sad about what happened to them. Diluvia was my 2012 graduate school fieldwork album - nothing like driving for hours across the flat lands of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley to go survey shorebirds, while imagining myself instead on a grand desperate interstellar journey for survival.

God. I'm so sad. But at least they gave us two masterpieces.

Also!! If you don't know who Lord Huron are then yes listen! Like half the stuff I post is fanart of their characters and stories. INSANE concept storytelling work with a heavy heavy Twin Peaks plus cosmic dread angle via like five different genres per album. Incredible stuff.

[tinylongwing]

Music recs list for my fellow Vide Noir-heads

(And everyone else too)

I've often seen, and even echoed the sentiment, that Lord Huron's album Vide Noir is completely unique. Nobody else is putting out big concept indie rock albums about existential dread in an uncaring and horrifying cosmos when you're just trying to look for the girlfriend who ghosted you and you wind up deep in a Los Angeles neo-noir involving eldritch space drugs and hallucinations from across time and space, okay? That's fair.

BUT.

While none of the below are the same, I do think they're likely to scratch some of that itch while you wait for more. Please check them out! You might find something you like. All of the below are bands that release concept albums meant to be listened to from start to finish, so I'll be recommending whole albums, not singles. Also these are youtube links because that's what I use but you can for sure find all of these everywhere you get music.

Typhoon

Criminally underrated for way too long. Huge sweeping orchestral indie rock sounds that would be right at home if a movie was made of one of their albums (what a dream that would be). Most of their music is inspired by a combination of the works of David Lynch and the frontman/writer's personal battles with Lyme disease and his subsequent near death. Listen to EVERYTHING they have put out ever, but especially:

Offerings (2018): According to the band, "It's a record from the perspective of a mind losing its memory at precisely the same time the world is willfully forgetting its history. The urgent question becomes: without causality, without structures of meaning, without essential features of rational thought, is there anything that can save us from violence/oblivion?

With no past and no future, there is only suffocating, annihilating, present, looping on and on ad infinitum (to me, one plausible definition of hell) and the best you can hope for is that somewhere in the void there exists some small, irreducible certainty—a fragment, a kernel, something—that you may have the good fortune to stumble upon before it's all over.

You know, a boy/girl-meets-girl/boy-everyone-dies-in-botched-attempt-at-neo-pagan-sacrificial-ritual-on-global-scale kind of thing."

White Lighter (2013): More directly inspired by Morton's survival of Lyme disease and organ failure, about finding hope when things feel utterly hopeless, and his gratitude toward his father for saving his life via kidney donation. (There is a 10th anniversary version of this album that includes some unrelated singles that were never released on albums, fyi - I find they interrupt the flow of the original intended release).

Arcade Fire

Oscillating between dance pop and indie orchestral folk-rock-baroque pop, these guys are pretty well known (The Suburbs won the Grammy for best album of 2010, after all). But! If you haven't heard them, or if you forgot they existed, this is a really really excellent time to listen to their work.

The Suburbs (2010): If you're going to start anywhere with this band, start here. Stay here a while. Inspired by some of the band members' upbringings in suburbian Texas, the album is an apocalyptic journey through end-stage capitalism and it's fucking jawdropping.

mewithoutYou

Post-hardcore/art rock band that incorporates spirituality and religion-as-myth and history from viewpoints around the world in order to write incredibly moving music about the human condition.

Ten Stories (2012): Inspired by multiple similar real world events from the 19th and early 20th centuries, this album is about a traveling circus on a train that crashes in 19th-century Montana, and the journeys of the circus animals as they flee the wreckage, or try to rebuid their own societies. Gorgeous, desolate, heartbreaking.

Pale Horses (2015): Visions of the apocalypse from the perspectives of multiple world mythologies as well as from the personal perspective of the narrator observing the ruin in his own life and the city around him.

Freelance Whales

The greatest tragedy here is these folks no longer make music - one member left the band, another has passed away. Thankfully, they put out two gorgeous indie folk-pop concept albums first that I think any Lord Huron fan should listen to. Read the descriptions, you'll see why.

Weathervanes (2010): While not all songs on this album are directly linked, many of them are, and those songs follow the narrative of a boy whose family moves into an old house that turns out to be haunted. He falls in love with the ghost who lives there, and winds up killing himself to be with her - and finds he has no regrets, for life is short anyway.

Diluvia (2012): Heavily inspired by Battlestar Galactica and stories of ancient aliens, this is the tale of a distant civilization which collapses from a combination of natural disasters and perhaps their own hubris. A few of them manage to escape on a starship, and eventually discover Earth and its ancient pre-humans. The dying aliens seed the Earth with their own DNA in order to preserve the genetic traces of their once-existence.

[tinylongwing]

Rough study of an intersex Mallard, based on a photo by redditor u/Pugsterpal.

Lots of birds can be intersex of course, but Mallards are one of the most frequently observed, probably because they're fairly common, easy to photograph, and the traits we think of as typically male- or female-type are easy to tell apart (if you saw a Song Sparrow that was intersex, for example, how would you ever know?)

[tinylongwing]

Vide Noir gave us a character and immediately took him away again and that's cruel so here's a much better look at Alex Redmayne than the one we got.