- ask
-
I love loons 🖤 their lovely plumage can be hard to capture with squares.
-
I know I’m being an insufferable worldbuilding nerd here, but my basic metric for evaluating media with very inhuman protagonists is “how easily can one offer a complete and coherent account of this media’s plot without ever mentioning the fact that the protagonist is, for example, a talking car?”. The harder it is, the higher it scores.
@hewwbwazew I would LOVE to read this holy shit
@territorialoak I hope you don’t mind me adding your tags here, that story is just too good and I’m Obsessed
also @gilgamemesh I feel like this is your vibe too
(via cemeterything)
-
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
CCXLI: Passerellidae
Moving deeper into Passeroidea, we come to Passerellidae: the American sparrows. There are 132 species ranging across the Americas. Pictured are the eastern towhee (Piplio erythrophthalma) and yellow-browed sparrow (Ammodramus aurifrons).
American sparrows are ubiquitous and familiar across their vast range. Unlike the strictly open-area sparrows of Afroeurasia, these birds are found in a variety of habitats, from Arctic tundra to tropical forest. Fruit, seeds, and invertebrates comprise their diets, with the relative proportions of each varying by species and time of year.
Monogamy is the standard for American sparrows. Nests are open cups or domes, placed on the ground or amongst vegetation. One of the most incredible vertebrate sexual systems is found in a member of this family, the white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis). These sparrows functionally have 4 sexes: the typical male and female (ZZ or ZW chromosomes, respectively) as well as tan-stripe and white stripe (homozygous or heterozygous chromosome 2, respectively). This unusual change was the result of a mutation which inverted a segment of chromosome 2, hypothesized to have been caused by hybridization with another species. Birds with one copy of this mutated chromosome bear white crown stripes, and are also behaviorally different from the tan-stripe morphs. Like “typical” sex chromosome, this mutated chromosome does not cross over during meiosis. Because of the complementary behaviors, tan-stripes prefer to breed with white-stripes, and vice versa. Therefore, white-throated sparrows have a 4-sex breeding system: males breed with females, and tan-stripes breed with white-stripes.
(via honeycomb-butch)
-
Javier Zurita Wildlife Photography
Green-headed Tanager, photo taken in São Paulo-Brazil
(via oneheadtoanother)
-
There are some animals you only see in pictures with very little to compare its size to that make you go into cardiac arrest once you find out how big/small they actually are
ALT
ALTThis shouldn’t be physically possible. Herons should not be this small
(via supremebirdbracket)
-
The site is ‘12ft Ladder’ found here:
Reblogging this on ALL my blogs because holy shit is it useful
-
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALTA four page comic about drawing, drawn for the Portland Public Library’s newest exhibit, “Why We Make Comics: Reflections on Storytelling”.
If you live in Portland ME, you can see this comic, as well as three others drawn by Isabella Rotman, Caroline Hu, and Liz Prince, on display from October 6th to December 31 at the library!
@todaysbird a cute comic about birds!
(via todaysbird)
-
Bateleur (Terathopius ecaudatus)
Photographed by Albert Beukhof
(via fatbushtit)
-
Caught this Belted Kingfisher flying around the area. I don’t think crows like them that much.
(via fatbushtit)
-
Endemic to the Wolf and Darwin Galápagos Islands, the Vampire Ground Finch is a rare bird that drinks the blood of other living birds. During times of extreme drought, this unusual blood-drinking behaviour is crucial in the finch’s survival.
(via cemeterything)