Still Dialing In The Right Amount Of Wax, Thankfully These Seals Can Be Remelted!

Still dialing in the right amount of wax, thankfully these seals can be remelted!

If you're interested in receiving a hand-written letter in the mail every month chock-full of forbidden information on the plant, bird, or animal of your choice, consider supporting my work on Patreon!

https://www.patreon.com/TABS

I am sorry but I am legally enjoined from writing about Turacos due to a little-used provision in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. All inquiries about these animals must be be answered by a different ornithographist so as to minimize monopolies and ensure competition. I personally recommend @blurds for all of your Turaco needs, because he’s got seven pages of them already.

this bird does not look real

Giveaway has ended! 

Thank you to everybody (especially @blurds, @birdycreatures, and @speciesofleastconcern) who helped boost visibility, my friend was able to clear out their lab freezer.

If you are one of the people who liked/reblogged because you thought this was a surrealist shitpost, you should really get to know experimental animal researchers since this is like, regular day stuff. Seriously, when I crashed ICVM 2016 there was an actual for-real research presentation where methodology involved strapping heavy backpacks to live surly peacocks during mating season and nobody considered this at all unusual. (incidentally the presentation immediately after had a severed emu foot hooked up to artificial tendons to test moment arms of emu toes so yeah shit gets weird. and tbh it’s not just lab stuff that gets bizarre, check out #fieldworkfails or #fieldworkscares for how anomalous the world becomes on the edges of new knowledge)

Science is weird and full of the uncanny and I wholeheartedly encourage people to get to know biological scientists; the stories you’ll get out of that friendship are just incredible. Speaking of, if you get a chance you should ply Dr. Frank Fish with good food, drinks, and pleasant company because he’ll tell you all sorts of neat stuff in return.

Bird brain giveaway!

(image source)

Well, not exactly. 

Someone who isn’t me happens to have a surplus of Western Scrub Jay brain sections (40um), and is looking for a person or persons who could make use of them. They are leftovers from completely legitimate research testing how they reacted to dead conspecifics, predators, and alarm calls. Some are male, some are female, some were parasitized (body cavity worms) others were clean, some were aggressive, some were not; there is a good variety is what I assume my friend is saying. Caveats: the tissue samples have been floating in cryoprotectant for the past five years at -20C, so they may not even be viable and need testing to see if they can be stained. My friend (who I must reiterate is not me) is unable to afford such testing so think of this as a blind box situation where you might not get what you want. If the samples do end up useful then coauthorship is expected. Also, to further drive home the point that I am just relaying this information and do not personally have an astonishing variety of preserved neural tissue in my freezer, the samples are in Australia. So if you are an actual scientist who could make use of such a thing please contact me at nikole.ancona@gmail.com with the subject line of “i assure you i am not a bird zombie” and I will pass along your information. If you aren’t an actual scientist but do have scientist friends, please help out this completely separate person from myself and reblog this post.

Serious inquiries ONLY.

Where is the little Facebook button on your posts so I can share your words of wisdom with the aviary masses??

If you are reading on Birdscience.org instead of through the Tumblr dashboard, you should see three dots at the bottom of every entry. Click on them, and it should show a bunch of ways to share the post across a variety of platforms. Here, have an informative .gif specially made just for you!

First described by famously colourblind zoologist Carl Linnaeus, the Grey Phalarope can be distinguished from other Phalaropes by their rusty grey feathers and banana-grey beak with a black tip. With a diet consisting of equally-drab insects and small crustaceans, these wholly unremarkable birds spend their lives blending in with their surroundings.

I am super stoked about this!!! This is the first I think actual factual non-commissioned art inspired by my work here at The Academy of Bird Sciences.

HOWEVER

(she says, pedantically)

It appears you’ve accidentally drawn a Gorgeted Blue Heron instead! The giveaway was the fact that it’s holding a sword; Gross Blue Herons use short clubs or their own bodies because it makes their racially-targeted violence more ‘personal’. Gorgeted Blue Herons on the other hand are all about martial appearances, cleaving to more ‘elegant’ instruments of warfare.

Don’t feel too bad about this sort of misidentification! It happens all the time among field interns, no doubt in part because the Alpha codes all resolve down to GBHE.

Night shift doodle! How better to represent the Gross Blue Heron than with the V of Swords. He’ll take everything you have and doesn’t even feel a little sorry. Inspired by @maverick-ornithography​.