Can someone please tell me this was a pair that was trying to do the death spiral that mating birds of prey do, and somehow in the process they ended up stuck on a road sign.
Because if it is, this is definitely one of the funniest “Okay, maybe we WERE a little bit over our head when we started this…” moments.
I doubt it. One of these birds is a juvenile (the top) while the other is an adult (bottom). The juvenile would have no interest in mating.
Honestly when I see hawks doing stupid stuff 9/10 times its a harris hawk—this seriously just looks like one of those stupid hawks time. They are one of the only social raptors, so this leads to some funny things, like
Stacking
The harris hawk argument for stacking is “your back is less Pokey than a cactus so imma use it”
Not even falconers are safe…
They even hold hands
Please, what are you doing harris hawks, learn how to hawk
Rating the birds in my backyard by tendency toward violence
Northern Cardinal, 4/10
I'm sometimes worried the male is sexually harassing the female but I'm pretty sure they're just doing some elaborate public pickup roleplay. The rest of us didn't agree to participate in your kink, guys.
American Robin, 1/10
Literally just some dude hanging out. Never bothered anyone but worms. Big fan of the way you just stand there in the middle of the grass like you forgot what you were supposed to be doing.
House Sparrow, 10/10
You're a gang. You're participating in gang violence. There's ten billion of you living in a single wood pile and it's been civil war for three years now. When will the bloodshed end?
Tufted Titmouse, 1/10
A shy baby. A pretty little guy. I saw you on the neighbor's garage roof and time stopped. There were anime sparkles around you. Come back.
European Starling, 9/10
Why is it always you? Listen, I know, I KNOW the sparrows are the problem, and YET. When the fighting starts, it's always you in the middle of it, provoking them and then screaming like you're an innocent bystander defending yourself. I'm onto you.
Carolina Wren, 3/10
This rating is not for physical violence, which you don't engage in, but for your role as an incurable narc. A tattle tale. I know they're fighting again, okay? I see it. Our yard has been a warzone for years, you don't have to make a big announcement every time someone misbehaves.
Eastern Wood-Peewee, 0/10
If this were "birds who think they're better than everyone else," you'd get 10/10.
Red-bellied Woodpecker, 6/10
It's a utility pole. It's not a tree. You're surrounded by trees that are full of bugs. But there you are, on the utility pole. Committing vandalism.
American Crow, unrated
For who am I to cast judgment on the actions of La Famiglia? I assume you are doing what is best for the neighborhood. If I could, though, without criticism, make a single observation. That when large numbers of you gather in the ominous dead cottonwood - no? No, you're right. None of my business.
Great Crested Flycatcher, 5/10
Frankly, I think you could be doing more. I think your name implies a great potential. I think you should massacre the insects. I think your beak should drip with viscera.
La Famiglia does not suffer you to stop in our neighborhood long, and I trust their judgement in this manner. You have the look of a guilty bird.
Tennessee Warbler, 2/10
You keep to yourselves, and I respect that. I get the sense that you could defend yourselves if it came to it, though.
Brown-Headed Cowbird, 3/10
You're not a crow, and eventually they ARE going to figure it out, kiddo.
Gray Catbird, 5/10
Would you. Respectfully. Would you shut the FUCK UP.
Eurasian Collared-Dove, 0/10
You're doing great, sweetie, everyone loves you.
Red-Breasted Nuthatch, 4/10
A comedian. A little jester of a bird. You're so silly. Sure sometimes you incite violence in others but, really, is that your fault? If it is, we forgive you.
Blue Jay, 12/10
If you could learn any human behavior you wanted, it would be how to build a bomb.
Honorable mention:
Turkey Vulture, 5/10
You weren't in my backyard, but you WERE eating roadkill in the street in my neighborhood. I know the animal was already dead when you got there, but you get violence points for frightening the small children that walked past you. Incredible work.
can’t forget the Lyre-tailed Nightjar! there’s actually a number of these ridiculous guys, and they’re partly why caprimulgiforms are some of my favorite birds
also the Sickle-winged Nightjar, which is. come on, that’s just a weird moth
and if we’re going to make this onto a full-on nightjar weirdness appreciation post, I feel like I’ve got to mention their pectinate claws:
photo from here:
I'm running again, have been since late June, doinky arthritic toe and all. It's fine. It hurts sometimes when there's a big weather front
comb-shaped claws on the middle toe have evolved multiple times among a diverse variety of birds, found in nightjars, barn owls, herons, frigatebirds, and a few other groups. and despite looking exactly like they’re used for preening out feather parasites, they might have other uses for keeping birds clean that we haven’t yet identified:
Astute birdwatchers might have noticed that some bird species have comb-like serrations running along one edge of a toe claw. This feature,
thats not a “zine” that is an “art book” and you are scaring the hoes (discouraging people from zinemaking by associating it with hefty sleek professionalism instead of extremely diy no resources low cost artistic communication) by mixing up these words
let's get back to making this shit by hand, I've been meaning to do some of these for my comics characters but my brain was always like 'but you haven't actually made the comic no one's gonna know these fuckers' u know what too bad I'm gonna make em anyway
-> here's how to fold an 8 page zine from 1 paper with instructions that didn't make me feel like I was back in a trigonometry lecture [LINK]
-> here's a neat accordion type 16 pager [LINK]
go nuts. and let's all collectively stop calling those fucking art books zines please it sucks
it's immensely tragic and fucked up but also a little funny when someone is so incapable of accepting that they're worthy of love and affection without any kind of justification or ulterior motive that you have to wrap it up in some kind of practical reasoning like hiding a pill in ham and peanut butter to make your dog think they're getting a tasty treat. come closer, sharing body heat will help us both keep warm [waits until you're settled comfortably in my arms] and i like spending time with you and just being near you. lmao. get loved idiot.
A Short List of Doves In The USA That You May Confuse With Each Other
Mourning Dove Zenaida Macroura
Year-round native across most of the USA, with breeding populations up into Canada, and non-breeding populations extending into Mexico. Least Concern, plentiful, and often hunted for meat though hunting does little to lessen it's numbers. There is often a whistling sound heard when the mourning doves land and take off - it is not a call but rather a sound made by the feathers of the wings themselves.
Distinguishing features: Distinctive mournful woo-OOO-wooo, wooo, wooo call, occasionally, clean pale coloring of head and neck, darker wings with dark spots. Click here to hear!
Eurasian Collared Dove Streptopelia decaocto
European and Asian native, was introduced to North America, Japan and the Carribean. It is invasive in USA.
Distinguishing features: A quick, rolling sort of goo-GOO-goo call, similar to a rock dove coo. Also, they make a loud HAH sound when taking off or landing. Click here to hear!
White-Winged Dove Zenaida asiatica
White winged doves are native to the very southern parts of the USA and to Mexico and the Carribean.
Distinguishing features: Bright red eye surrounded by blue skin, brownish feathering with a dark stripe below the cheek on each side of the nect, the bold white stripe along the leading edge of the wings.
Common Ground Dove Columbina Passerina
Small dove species native to the southernmost parts of the following: California, Southern Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida in the USA, most of Mexco and Central America, and the northern parts of South America including Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, small parts of Peru and Ecuador and parts of northern Brazil.
Distinguishing features: Small size, overall brownish coloring with dark mahagony primaries and dark spots that glisten blue on the wings. Similar in some ways to the Mourning Dove but has a much shorter tail and is smaller.
Inca Dove Columbina Inca
Native to southern parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, Mexico, and parts of Central America.
Distinguishing Features: Pale coloring overall with a distinctive "scale' like edge on the feathers of the body. Noticeably smaller than the well known Rock Dove/Pigeon, and shorter overall than the mourning dove.
let's talk, then :D do you have any favorite tv show lately? also, are you more of a binge-watch or one-episode-per-day type of person?
Aww, thanks for the ask, I appreciate it!
I am actually not a person who watches a whole lot of TV or movies and the fact that I have been in any TV/movie fandoms at all is a testament to how much I want to be in some fandom if it'll get me to actually watch something. I'm about three years behind on all the new Star Treks, for example. Books are great; I can read books for hours on end. (A lot of my Trek fandom was me reading the official novels.) I just have a hard time paying attention to TV/movies and I can probably watch at most two hours of anything at a time before I start getting really restless. I am trying to keep up with the Disney+ Marvel shows but have not started Ms. Marvel yet. (I did watch Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness the other day. I experienced some Madness, all right.)
(As of last year, I somehow got deeply into watching baseball on TV, which as far as I am concerned is perfect because I don't actually have to pay any attention to it and they let you know when something you should pay attention to.)
@lysimache likes watching TV more than I do and she really enjoys hitting the "Watch Something" button on Netflix and Netflix has decided that she wants to watch gay high school shows, so now we've seen Heartstopper and First Kill and we're part of the way through The Politician. Other than that, uh, I guess we watched Our Flag Means Death just like everyone else in fandom, and we're about halfway through a rewatch of the RayK season(s) of Due South.
But what I have been watching recently is actually a lot of obscure Avengers shows and movies because our 18+ 616 Steve/Tony Discord server You Gave Me A Home has been spending the week celebrating 616 Day and our server anniversary, so we've been watching some 616 Steve & Tony-adjacent... stuff. So far this week, it's been a dramatic livereading along with the YouTube video of Captain America/Iron Man: Invasion Force (which I posted about the other day) some of the 1960s Avengers cartoons (which are straight out of the early comics because they are so low-budget they mostly just animated the actual panels), Next Avengers (the direct-to-DVD movie where Tony has to raise all the other Avengers' kids in the Ultron robot post-apocalypse), and last night we watched both of the 1979 made-for-TV live-action Captain America movies (I am not sure I would call either of them good, per se, but I had a whole lot of fun watching them and I honestly would watch them again). So that's been fun.
(I'm not sure what else we're planning to watch; I think the contenders include the 1990s Iron Man cartoon, the 1944 Captain America serial, and maybe some EMH because EMH is actually good.)
Oh God, I remember those 60s Avengers cartoons! I swear some of the scenes look like they just held the comic book pages up in front of a camera and wiggled them around. (But the Iron Man theme song is hilarious and there a part where Tony fights a shark).
Coloring ALL the Things: I’ve Got 72 Sharpies and a Pastel Blue Ain’t One
So last time on Coloring All the Things, I tried out Bic Intensity Permanent Markers and discovered that they blew sharpies out water in every category, and by that I mean ‘they print the color names on the barrel, are comfy, and are available in pastels’.
So I had to return to my comfort zone, Sharpie, and see if Bic Intensity really was the superior permanent marker (to use in children’s coloring books).
Guys it was a total disaster.
(I’m sorry I gave you jaundice, Thor.)
Swatches, thoughts, and a post mortem on what went wrong after the read more.
If you read my Bic Intensity review, you might remember the color Oceanview Blue and how much I loved it and how it layered over other colors.
With 72 sharpies, surely I have something close?
At first glance we have a couple of hopeful contenders. One of the caps is a VERY close match for Oceanview Blue. So let’s test them out.
Well, shit.
You can see my beautiful correction of Blue Ice to Sky Blue, a correction that was necessary because, again, sharpies do not have the color name written anywhere on the barrel. I realized that Blue Ice was a color that only came in Ultra Fine in my set, thus the marker tested could not be it. The names of all these sharpies are just my best guess, based on the wildly inaccurate swatches on the side of the box.
All the sharpies tested, despite the color of the caps, are highly saturated and mid range value, compared to the grey-blue of Bic’s Misty Blue and the glorious pastel Oceanview Blue. And while highly saturated colors is what we love Sharpie for, it makes coloring in layers… well. You’ve already seen the results.
I am loathe to color skin tones in one flat color. I want some variation. Since I was out of luck so far as pastels went, my thinking was, well, maybe I could use some lighter value colors (like, say, yellow) under my one taupe-y color and get some variation that way.
I badly underestimated the power of sharpie yellow.
I further could not desaturate the blues I used in Thor’s costume with grey, leading to the confusing mess of color and value all throughout the body. I had been ambitious, trying to mark out core shadows with a darker color, but all I ended up with was chaos.
With things not turning out how I liked, I decided it was time for desperate measures. I decided to break out the metallic silver. Maybe I would just have some cool effects (and wipe out some of the mistakes I made in the silver circles covering Thor’s costume).
It started out well enough. I was emboldened to expand my use of the silver to outline Thor himself, to make his silhouette stand out better after butchering the costume.
Unfortunately right around the bottom of the arm, my silver pen started to die. I don’t know if it was because it was drying out or because the cheap, newsprint quality paper killed the nib. Between this and the dead on arrival Bic Intensity metallic pen, I wonder if it’s just something to do with the metallic ink formula.
Either way, this coloring page was cursed and I am glad to be finished.
Despite not having a good time with this page or enjoying the results, I don’t really blame the markers. The high saturation, vivid colors are definitely a good thing. For drawing patterns or abstracts, these are probably great. But the lack of contrast in values and the lack of neutrals or ability to mix neutrals really puts a cramp on my style.
But while the sharpies are still great markers, Bic still has to take the crown. Having the color names on the barrel turned out to be a bigger deal than I expected, as I didn’t have to constantly swatch pens with similar caps out on scrap paper to make sure I had the right one. The barrel is still more comfortable to hold. The price is right.
If I ever plan to get high on alcohol fumes while coloring again, I know which markers will be my first choice, and it’s not Sharpie.
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andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
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romaincrisis
origamiaround
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tangentwithtanner
vaporwave
