For those who donāt follow kakapo conservation, they are critically endangered parrots who only breed on years where the rimu tree they rely on meet a certain threshold of fruit production. One breeding season in 4 years can be typical, and about half of all eggs laid by kakapo are infertile (they still arenāt completely certain why, it could be a recent population bottleneck) so each fertile egg is worth its weight in gold.
This was one of only 5 fertile eggs laid on the Whenua Hou island population in the 2014 breeding season and it got crushed by its mother on accident. It was mended with glue and tape and incubated by the rangers until hatching.
At 150 days old kakapo chicks are officially added to the population total and given a unique name, until then they are given their motherās name and a number for birth order laid in the clutch. This chick was known as Lisa-one before officially being given the name Ruapuke by local indigenous Ngai Tahu people.Here he is grown up:
Itās sad when a species is so rare we know them all individually but at the same time I love that you can point at this one bird and say oh thatās Ruapuke, his mom sat on him too hard
List of things that sparked joy in my little Ancient culture enthusiast heart:
The moths in the Ancient Urban are essentially pigeons, including the fact some of them are tagged.
Finally a proper and canon confirmation that Ancients really did have pets, positive relationships with animals and weren't Only stuck in glass cubes on display like Moon implies once.
It can also mean that they did research into animal behaviour, such as tracking migrating and such. From how biologists are in real life, we can assume they were even genuinely passionate & happy about these type of things.
All the pottery and plates in that workshop room,
A confirmation that they did have paper and used scrolls for writing stuff down,
alongside with the pearls that they, too, could perhaps freely read or one of those things on the shelf there might be a pearl reader, if it is more technologically based (CDs type information keeping)
I also wonder if those things there are books- with stone tablet pages or paper ones? digital things hidden in hardcovers?- or something else entirely. Do they maybe hold orders for earthenware?
The masks on the wall, they feel so real compared to the murals.
Are they of the same person or is it of the workers there or maybe a family? Some of them look similar to those in the murals.
While at the concept of family, they had creches, but it doesn't sound like it was an outright job in the sense that they seem to have been community-raised (I fuckin' knew it I can put down my tin hat now).
They had hard beds, similar to what used to be used in old china iirc, along with that pillow/headrest
This kinda thing. They were made out of porcelain to keep the head cool in the night, but I think some where out of wood too.
The bustling of the city.
The normalcy of people going about their day, talking, the vehicles zipping by (they had some kind of motor vehicles!!!!).
The architecture, in both the Ancient Urban and the Outer Rim (those roofs made the right side worth it to me, that's how much I love these bastards)
I find it very funny that what looks to me like a REALLY poor ass cable management seems like the height of decorative prowess to them.
Also some insight into how the void ,,bath" actually looked like.
The toys... just the toys.
Alongside these dialogues
And the one about him remembering the halls he ran through- oh when I say that I adore the fact that this Echo is a kid stuck here, lonely and vulnerable with polite speech not plaguing it.
The original Echoes combined with the Iterators' distaste for the species as whole painted the Ancients as these heartless things lazer focused only on the Ascension, religion and rituals. There wasn't much space for thinking about them in a more human manner and I feel like most of the fandom did depict the Ancients only as the impression was given. Bunch of posh full of themselves suckups, uncaring much for one another or anything around them.
I get kinda annoyed when there's an insistance that some kind of sapient species has done only bad. With humans, too, I just about had it with the demonization, negativity and staggering blindness to the beauty and good we can and do create- in both fiction and reality. Same goes for these dumbasses.
Disko kid here begs to challenge that impression. He's lost and alone and kind of scared, stuck here not knowing how to move forward. He mourns the regularity and simplicity of his room, the nostalgia of shelves and toys, the golden sunrays sneaking in through the windows. He brings a certain humanity into the consideration of Ancients.
That maybe, only maybe.. they deserve to be mourned.
hey guys great news. guess who saw a doctor recently and it turns out my shitty comprehension skills that coincidentally got worse around the same time i got hit in the head with a spinning loose bench board in middle school probably wasnt just an autism thing and chances are i have aphasia thatās just been unchecked this whole time
