#ghost birds

[3gremlins]

january's mythological creature was the bake-kujira! which is a yokai that takes the shape of an animated whale skeleton and brings a curse upon anyone who has the misfortune to encounter them.  A few tales suggest they seek revenge on the humans that took their lives (or the lives of whales in general) and will bring plagues and other disasters upon villages. 

They're said to be accompanied by strange fish and birds and stormy tides.

i took this idea and ran with it- i wanted to give the whale a sort of "suspended" in plasma ghost look while also keeping the skeleton as the main part. When I was looking around for reference, I found all these neat radiographs of fish and took inspiration from that for the skeletal ghost fish (which are more the IDEA of skeletal fish than as is. I tried to make them just bones at first and i didn't care for it and it wasn't fun to draw). I also used this idea with the birds- though they are more a combination of the whale treatment and the fish treatment (bird skeletons are more fun to draw than fish skeletons)

the coloring page itself is available to all patrons and there a prints in my shop | please do not repost

[rvhillisillo]

I discovered these unbelievable photographs and this fascinating story after my second archive visit. I was moved by this bird specimen. When I researched online I came across the work of James T. Tanner - an American ornithologist who was also moved by this illusive species. He was a doctoral candidate from Cornell University, and in 1937 he was sent to try and track down the Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers, hoping to find juveniles, in a Louisa forest called the Singer Tract, as there had been reports of the bird sighted here.

On his trip, he managed to find an Ivory-Bill’s nest, after watching two adults fly into a hole in the tree. After 16 days watching the nest, Tanner noted that the adults would generally forage for the juveniles for approximately 20 minutes at midday. As it had never been done before, Tanner decided to attach an identification band to the juveniles leg while the parents away from the nest.

To cut a long story short, he managed to do this, however during the process, the juvenile fell out of the nest, crash landing in a “tangle of vines”. Terrified of the consequence, Tanner clambered down the tree to retrieve the juvenile. He picked it up and miraculously it hadn’t been injured. It clambered all over him and actually seemed to be pretty happy. After taking these photographs, which are the only existing photographs of living Ivory-Billed nestlings, it was returned to the nest, with an I.D band.

Tanner took these photographs in 1938, however they were not found until 2009, by his widow in an envelope at home!

Since then, numerous sightings have been reported by experienced ornithologists in the Arkansas area, however it has still not been confirmed. So the question of whether this species is now extinct or not, is still unknown.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-close-encounter-with-the-rarest-bird-54437868/

[znqrlbhybbx]

Watch "Potoos Are Hauntingly Cute" on YouTube

I love Potoos!

[pastcloudfromffvii]

so clockwork just died. honestly i didnt think she was going to last very long without eden. now they can go cause havoc together and be shitbirds wherever they are now.

[kangsojeong]

randy wuz here

the first ghost i ever believed in was that of randy, our pet cockatiel. i was seven years old when he came to us one morning, dancing limply in the sprinklers watering my parents’ tomato garden. yet so bold with that yellow plumage like billy idol in need of a haircut. my mother plucked him barehanded and took me to petsmart to pick a cage to replace the one he’d lost. we named him randy after my uncle who’d died a few months ago, liver cancer that took him within the week of my mother’s visit, within a week of learning i had an uncle randy in arizona. but my mother never had premonitory dreams of randy the bird’s death like randy her brother’s. she stood at my bed on a morning in december and announced, “hon, randy’s dead.” i sat up and cried. she took me out to lunch at denny’s, and i ate chicken noodle soup and cried in the booth. we buried randy the bird in a box, in a narrow passage of dirt between the house and our neighbors’ yard. i split a pair of chopsticks and glued them together in the shape of a cross to mark his grave. after school sometimes, i led my friends to that little path where no sunlight reached. any tilt of the cross, a bit of dirt on the cinder blocks, became evidence of randy the ghost. “randy’s been here!” i yelled every time. we ran and ran, as deep into the house as a quasi-split-level ranch home allowed. my mother took me back to petsmart. we picked out a pair of parakeets that we named daisy and buster, like my grandparents’ terriers.

[flowersrocketship]

absence of copper-containing enzymes

[catastrophe641]

There is a bird somewhere right outside my window being an asshole and chirping...but there is literally nothing outside my window for it to be on...I can't find the little fucker!!