So We Cannot In Good Faith Insult These Pigeons Without Taking Accountability For How We Shaped Their

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Why Do Pigeon Nests Look So Shitty? An Investigation | Defector

To our human eyes, a pigeon nest looks objectively half-assed—a nest that mocks other nests.

So we cannot in good faith insult these pigeons without taking accountability for how we shaped their current existence. We domesticated them for our own purposes, raising them for meat and messaging, and when they escaped or when they no longer served us, we abandoned them and called them rats with wings. They are, whether we like it or not, some of our longest-running companions. 

reading this article someone sent me about why pigeons make nests Like That and im getting emotional about pigeons again

uh ok hi my hobbies are making nests and eating little black seeds out of the dirt. my favorite color is [untranslatable shade of UV-reflection] and my favorite food is little black seeds and dirt

A collection of diving birds.

A kingfisher, a pelican, an osprey, and a booby.

Ghost Stories

Passenger Pigeon

(Art by Louis A. Fuertes)

Moving over to the Columbimorphae,  we come to the famous passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). These iconic birds once ranged across Eastern North America.

Passenger pigeons need no introduction. These were among the most numerous birds in the world, with 3 to 5 billion individuals alive at their peak. In shape, they resemble the familiar morning doves, but with quite different colors. Their back and wings were blue-grey, their neck and breast were a pink-orange, and the males had iridescent display patches along the side of the neck.

Passenger pigeons were streamlined doves, with long pointed wings and long graduated tails, making them built for fast, agile flight. Famously, they traveled in massive flocks during their migration. The flocks were so massive that they were frequently described as blocking out the sun.

(Art by Julian P. Hume)

Passenger pigeons were largely reliant on masting events, years in which trees coordinated to produce excess amounts of fruits, particularly the acorns of various oaks. With the massive flocks they traveled in, these birds have been likened to forest fires in terms of their effect on the ecosystem: they would destroy the low vegetation with their copious droppings, while also providing nutrients, and break limbs of trees under the weight of a flock perching. This destruction was highly influential they passed through, creating regular and healthy disturbances to cycle the ecosystems, making them keystone species. When the trees were not masting, huge flocks would take to the ground, foraging through dirt and snow for seeds, fruit, and invertebrates, in a rolling wave.

So how does a species go from the most numerous bird on earth to extinct? As is often the case, we have colonialism and capitalism to blame. After all, indigenous people of the Americas lived alongside the pigeons for tens of thousands of years with a stable pigeon population, even as the human population increased. They were culturally important for certain eastern groups as well, such as the Wyandot and Ho-Chunk. Once Europeans arrived, they began to hunt the pigeons en masse, shooting into the enormous flocks passing overhead and killing hundreds to thousands at a time. Some market hunters go so far as to fell acres of roosting trees to scare up the birds. The advent of railroads made the mass hunting of pigeons even more commercial.

(Art by Frank Leslie)

The population decline of the passenger pigeon became widely notable by the late 1800s. Conservation laws were passed, but they were too little too late. The last confirmed wild sighting occurred in 1901 in Illinois. Famously, the last surviving passenger pigeons were a pair in the Cincinnati Zoo, named George and Martha. George passed in 1910, leaving Martha an endling in her enclosure for 4 years. On the first of September 1914, sometime in the early afternoon, Martha was found dead of old age on the floor of her cage, at approximately 29 years old.

Passenger pigeons have become an icon of extinction, showing that even the most prolific species are not safe from the violence of colonization, capitalism, and imperialism. At Wyalusing State Park in Southeast Wisconsin, atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, is a monument to the last known passenger pigeon shot in the state. Nearby is also a bench with a plaque engraved with the pigeon and the words "rest in peace and comfort, friend."

Saw a really weird owl the other day

How to Get a Chronological Dash as a New Blog

I've been working on a Tumblr Roleplaying 101 guide, and in doing so wound up making a brand new Tumblr account for some screenshots. And this process made me realize how weirdly complicated Tumblr has made it for new accounts to get a chronological dash. So if you just want to see posts from people you follow, in the order that they made them, this what you have to do.

First, go to your settings, go under Dashboard, and scroll down to Preferences. Toggle off Best Stuff First. This switches your dash from an algorithm feed to a chronological one.

If you have an older blog, that's all you have to do. But if your blog was created more recently, you have an extra step.

The Tumblr dashboard has different tabs, which you can see across the top of your feed. Most older users have completed tuned these out, because we don't care about anything other than the basic feed. There is a Following tab, which shows posts from users you follow, and a For you tab, which shows recommend posts Tumblr thinks you'll like.

On blogs created before May 8, 2023, the Following tab is the default view. However, blogs created after this date have the For you tab as the default view. (This is an intentional change by Tumblr.)

This means if you are a newer blog and want to see posts from people you follow, you'll need to manually switch to the Following tab every time you open the dashboard.

If you do not like this change, consider contacting Tumblr staff. Submit a form under the Feedback category and explain that you'd like the option to make the Following tab the default for new blogs. And please, be polite! There is a person on the other side of the screen who likely had no say in this change, and even if they did, they don't deserve to be yelled at.