More fountain pen bird sketches I've done recently while feeling kinda bad about art. I REALLY love birds that have a lot of texture in them, like the wrinkles in the skin of their bald heads, or fun feather shapes. And I LOVE a large bill.
So, uh. I locked in a bit too hard, on my day off from work (hence my fucked-up hair)...
...and folded my first origami model that uses tracing paper. Following in the success of my crane that I folded from a 1 cm square of mulberry paper earlier today, I folded yet another crane... but this time, it was made from a 0.5 cm square of tracing paper.
I had ICU ASMR playing in the background that entire time, since working on this thing under a light with two tweezers (for maximum precision), gloves (to prevent my fingertip sweat from warping the paper), and a mask (so I didn't accidentally breathe the model out of my grasp) made it genuinely feel like I was performing surgery on this model. It actually worked out a lot better than I could've ever guessed to get me fully immersed and invested into the project.
2 mg tablet of Estradiol for scale again, but I also included a single grain of white jasmine rice for additional emphasis on how small this model is. It's half the size of a grain of goddamn rice. This is now the SMALLEST origami model that I've ever folded in my entire life.
Arrivals and departures are staggered over several weeks, but at peak stopover, it's one of the great sights of natural America.
"Fears that Nebraska’s annual spring migration of sandhill cranes could be the avian equivalent of a “superspreader” event have been completely abated, as a record-setting stopover in Nebraska of thousands of birds was enjoyed without any sign of a bird flu outbreak.
Three-quarters of a million cranes migrating north to their spring habitat landed in the Platte River in Nebraska. The number is deemed an underestimation, but you try counting more than 700,000 birds.
Fears that the highly contagious new strain of bird flu H5N1 could carry over to the cranes from livestock have been assuaged as the birds are beginning to move off again without a single dead crane being observed, local news reports.
Aside from the mini celebration of bird flu’s absence, the real celebration—that this year was the largest on-record for the sandhill crane migration—can begin.
The official estimate of 738,000 animals was made during aerial surveys by the Crane Trust, a nonprofit whose raison d’etre is to protect these magnificent birds and this unforgettable spectacle.
Pictured: Crane migration in Nebraska
These cranes have been visiting an 80-mile-long stretch of the Platte River, braided in some sections, for 9 million years, which these days lies between the towns of Chapman and Overton, Nebraska.
“What makes the central Platte River valley attractive to sandhill cranes is the river that we help manage,” says Matt Urbanski, a spokesman for the Crane Trust, to KSNB’s Madison Smith. “We will make sure that there’s not a ton of vegetation choking the river out. We’ll make sure that it can widen, so the sandhill cranes have six to eight inches of water to sit in during the nighttime.”
The sandhill crane stands between 3 and 4 feet tall, and is easily identifiable for its crown of red feathers and their rattling bugle-like call. It is one of only 2 species of crane that live in North America...
Interestingly, though the cranes have visited this site for eons, they did so even before there was a river there. Additionally, they now spend much of their time feeding on spare corn kernels leftover from nearby harvests, and spend the night standing in the water where they’re safe from predators.
Arrivals and departures are staggered over several weeks, but at peak stopover, it’s one of the great sights of natural America.
“There is nothing else like it in the world,” says Marcos Stoltzfus, director of the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary in Gibbon, Nebraska, to News Channel Nebraska."
