She speaks to the bones. The bones reply.

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕

There was an arrest across the street from my place in Oakland one day – three cop cars with a bullhorn and guns out – and before I could even get out the gate there were a couple people posted up and one of them was filming and another one was narrating in a calm but very loud voice, just

“HE IS COOPERATING! HIS HANDS ARE EMPTY! HE IS DOING WHAT HE IS TOLD TO DO! HE IS HOLDING STILL! HIS HANDS ARE EMPTY! HE IS NOT BEING THREATENING! HE HAS PUT HIS HANDS BEHIND HIS HEAD AS ASKED! HE IS NOT RESISTING!”

and that was something I hadn’t thought to do before. It certainly let the cops know what the narrative of eye witnesses was going to be. 

I especially liked “his hands are empty” because this statement would still be true and a witnessed reason the police should not become violent even if it turned out he had a weapon on his person somewhere.

I see people in NYC stop and record a lot. Even if they are just being nosey, that’s still witnesses if shit goes down.

We must be vigilant.  The New Solidarity.  You might just save a fellow human being.

If you don’t feel comfortable with doing the narrating thing (which really is quite clever), even just standing around and blatantly staring actually legit helps immensely.

There are studies that show that even an image of someone looking can be effective to change people’s behaviours.

Sidenote: If you see a cop stopping an Indigenous person, the same protocol applies.

I did this in a parking lot when I saw a group of Black men and teens being harassed by a cop. Stayed in my car, but whipped out my phone and started to record, pointing out via narrative when I could hear the cop contradicting himself and changing his story. At the eight-minute mark, when I knew he was past the reasonable-stop guideline time (thanks, legal tips side of tumblr!), I flipped on my dome light.

Fam, what happened next was INCREDIBLE.

The cop had been gesturing in a wild way, almost flailing, like he was actively trying to get these guys agitated. He saw my dome light, saw a white face with a phone, and suddenly his hands came to rest on his vest. Within 90 seconds he’d packed his shit up and gone.

The most outspoken gentleman in the group came up to me and went “whatchu doing in there?” So I straight-up told him “it looked like you were being harassed, so I was recording.” The whole group recognized someone who was on their side, and started venting about the shit that had just gone down.

Turns out the asshole had had them stopped for a good five minutes before I pulled in. That means they were stopped, with no probable cause and a cop changing his story no fewer than three times, for AT LEAST THIRTEEN MINUTES. While chatting in a parking lot. One car had pulled in next to another that turned out to belong to one of his buddies and they were just shooting the shit when Officer Bacon came by.

Want to know the kicker here? One of the cop’s stories was that a group “matching their description” had been reported by the grocery store security guy for shoplifting. Black man, red shirt with a sports logo, jeans. Know what this convenient report didn’t mention?

HIS HEIGHT.

This guy was, without exaggeration, at least 6’10”. I assure you any report of him would have mentioned his height FIRST. And you’d best believe I pointed that out in my narration.

Cops WILL try shit. You CAN stop them. I did it and it was as simple as having some patience and a camera.

Same for muslims!

Look out for your fellow marginalized people!

Honestly, this applies to everyone. It’s a higher priority for the aforementioned groups, but nobody is safe around the police. The police are the enemy.

We Take Care of Each Other.

today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.

The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."

Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response

what I mean is, there is a persistent fallacy that the present situation of a thing is always worse than the past, even if there have been fluctuations in badness.

This is not true. There is a great wealth of specific cases where ecosystems/species/a specific anthropogenic impact on the environment is CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, better than it has been at any point in the past 100 years

I've been researching the history of conservation in the USA...and I think current doomers would benefit from knowing just how bad things got throughout the 20th century.

The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.

In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.

I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!

We actively tried to exterminate so many species. Bison. Wolves. Mountain lions. The US GOVERNMENT PAID PEOPLE TO KILL CARNIVORES. They're still here. They're reclaiming their old territories. All is not lost

The Nomads. From the Wonderful Worlds of Walt Disney: America. 1965.

Internet Archive

Gotta love it when your Bone Eyes are so well-developed that you can spot a skull on the side of the highway as you blast by at 65 mph two lanes over.

I have never seen a spike antler this long or thick before. I don't know how antlers are properly measured but, uh, it's longer than the entire skull. And the bottom three or so inches are thicker than any antler I've found.

Definitely worth pulling over and backing up some 400 feet to grab.

Texas Parks & Wildlife has a fantastic reference guide for determining the age of white-tailed deer based on the wear patterns of the mandibular teeth. Deer predictably replace their teeth at certain age milestones, so by looking at which teeth are more worn (and thus are due to be replaced) and which are sharper (and thus erupted more recently), you can get a rough idea of how many years old the individual was at the time of their death.

Another way to get a rough estimate of age is by looking at their post-cranial skeleton. White-tailed deer typically finish growing around three years of age, so if you are seeing a lot of unfused growth plates on the skeleton, your deer is likely under three.

Antler points are a way less reliable indicator of age than you think. While it's true that older, more mature bucks tend to have larger antlers with more points, it's not a given. Antler growth can be influenced by a number of factors, such as nutrition, testosterone levels, and whether the buck bumped into anything while he was in velvet. (Not even kidding. A really wonky antler probably belonged to a clumsy buck.) Antler is one of the fastest-growing tissues in the animal world, and it takes surprisingly little to make it go haywire.

Since I don't have this buck's lower jaw or any of his post-crania, unfortunately, definitively aging him will be difficult. However, I can still estimate his age and make some inferences about his life based on what I do have.

Looking at how sharp his maxillary teeth are, and based on my experiences aging other deer from their various skeletal elements, I think he was probably between two and three years old. While that sounds very young, it's a pretty common age for deer to die in my area, either after a vehicle strike or simply because they just do. I'm not really sure why it's so young, but when I find a deer that didn't die from any apparent trauma, they're usually around two/three years old.

Since one antler was apparently good enough to take, and his remaining antler is so well-developed, he likely had a good diet and was well-nourished. This also tracks with the area he was found in: There's a lot of farmland for deer to graze, and a lot of people will also put out corn and other feed for deer (and then gun them down in their back yards, southern MD is wild).

Because his antlers were fully developed and the remaining one doesn't show much signs of wear, and because there's no signs of breakdown around the pedicles, he probably died early in the rut last year, maybe around November or December. It's very common for bucks to die on the road during this time, as their increased testosterone levels lead them to very reckless behavior. White-tailed does' receptivity window is incredibly brief (only about 24 hours), so the bucks go a little bit crazy trying to mate with them in time. They'll just run straight into traffic if there's a doe on the other side of the highway.

So there you have it! An estimated age and some inferred life history on a very unusual buck skull!

While scrubbing him just now, I noticed something about the skull that might be a factor in his odd antler growth.

See the strange pitting and uneven bone growth near the pedicle?

He sustained a skull injury.

It looked well-healed, so it's an older injury. Based on its placement on the skull and my estimated age of two or three years, I suspect he sustained it during his first rut. He may have tried to wrestle with a buck too large, or slipped, or twisted, and taken a gouging hit to the skull. The injury probably damaged the pedicle on that side, leading to a malformed antler during the next growth cycle. Looking at how deep it still is, that pedicle probably never would've grown a proper antler after.

Unfortunately, a spike antler doesn't lock well, and does don't seem to like uneven bucks even when they win -- so even if he had lived to see more ruts, his chances of actually winning a mate would have been permanently lowered. Poor guy.

I really wish I could've seen what his other antler looked like now.

Gotta love it when your Bone Eyes are so well-developed that you can spot a skull on the side of the highway as you blast by at 65 mph two lanes over.

I have never seen a spike antler this long or thick before. I don't know how antlers are properly measured but, uh, it's longer than the entire skull. And the bottom three or so inches are thicker than any antler I've found.

Definitely worth pulling over and backing up some 400 feet to grab.

Texas Parks & Wildlife has a fantastic reference guide for determining the age of white-tailed deer based on the wear patterns of the mandibular teeth. Deer predictably replace their teeth at certain age milestones, so by looking at which teeth are more worn (and thus are due to be replaced) and which are sharper (and thus erupted more recently), you can get a rough idea of how many years old the individual was at the time of their death.

Another way to get a rough estimate of age is by looking at their post-cranial skeleton. White-tailed deer typically finish growing around three years of age, so if you are seeing a lot of unfused growth plates on the skeleton, your deer is likely under three.

Antler points are a way less reliable indicator of age than you think. While it's true that older, more mature bucks tend to have larger antlers with more points, it's not a given. Antler growth can be influenced by a number of factors, such as nutrition, testosterone levels, and whether the buck bumped into anything while he was in velvet. (Not even kidding. A really wonky antler probably belonged to a clumsy buck.) Antler is one of the fastest-growing tissues in the animal world, and it takes surprisingly little to make it go haywire.

Since I don't have this buck's lower jaw or any of his post-crania, unfortunately, definitively aging him will be difficult. However, I can still estimate his age and make some inferences about his life based on what I do have.

Looking at how sharp his maxillary teeth are, and based on my experiences aging other deer from their various skeletal elements, I think he was probably between two and three years old. While that sounds very young, it's a pretty common age for deer to die in my area, either after a vehicle strike or simply because they just do. I'm not really sure why it's so young, but when I find a deer that didn't die from any apparent trauma, they're usually around two/three years old.

Since one antler was apparently good enough to take, and his remaining antler is so well-developed, he likely had a good diet and was well-nourished. This also tracks with the area he was found in: There's a lot of farmland for deer to graze, and a lot of people will also put out corn and other feed for deer (and then gun them down in their back yards, southern MD is wild).

Because his antlers were fully developed and the remaining one doesn't show much signs of wear, and because there's no signs of breakdown around the pedicles, he probably died early in the rut last year, maybe around November or December. It's very common for bucks to die on the road during this time, as their increased testosterone levels lead them to very reckless behavior. White-tailed does' receptivity window is incredibly brief (only about 24 hours), so the bucks go a little bit crazy trying to mate with them in time. They'll just run straight into traffic if there's a doe on the other side of the highway.

So there you have it! An estimated age and some inferred life history on a very unusual buck skull!

Do y’all think siblings in medieval times would look at the little beasts in illuminated manuscripts and point at each other like ‘ha! ‘Tis thou!’

What she says: im fine

What she means: the average age of conception over the past 250k years is apparently 26.9. Let's round it down to 25. Think of your birth mother. Hold her hand. Imagine her holding hands with her mother. Within 4 people, you're back in time 100 years, and it's an intimate family dinner. Just after WWI. Add another 16 people, a small party of 20, and you're in the 1500s. Double it, twice, and you're at 80 people. Your family would fill a restaurant, and you're at the height of the Roman empire. At 100 people, Confucius is alive but Socrates has not yet been born. 100 people. That's a medium sized wedding. A small lecture theatre or concert. 200 people, probably the biggest party i could ever hope to host, takes you back 5000 years. The guests at your soirée of parents would be contemporaries of the Egyptian and Indus Valley civilisations, although you'd probably be too busy fixing drinks and nibbles to talk to all of them. Just imagine it. 200 of you. That's all it takes to get back 5,000 years. And we could go further. 1000 people, a decent sized concert, a large high school, and we're at the end of the last ice age. Your ancestors are comparing their pink floyd vinyl with music played on instruments carved from wood or bones of long vanished species. Wander through the crowd. See your own features and phrases and gestures refract out like a kaleidoscope. What would they make of you? What do you make of them? Why does it feel so unfair that even that first 100 years --that small family dinner of four--is out of your grasp? Maybe it's because questions of spatial distance have become negligible to us now. why, oh why, does time hold out against us so stubbornly

"Here's my (insert wild animal here)! I found him in the woods when he was just a baby, abandoned by his mother 🥹"

@cozy-fish-crow holy CRAP I work with some rehabbers and one of my things I do is help direct the public on what to do when they find wildlife alone. The amount of times people just straight up take fawns (deernap??) is crazy. I get they have good intentions but pLEASE.

You want to see something patently ridiculous?

In the right is Emon, my "alpha male" coyote and beloved leader of my Pack.

On the left is the new wolf.

Emon what the hell why are you so Huge.

[whispers quietly] Bruh.

me (decorated in bloody runes): man why did we ever stop worshipping golden idols this shit rules

severed bull’s head i carry with me for advice: if you mix sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter together you will become a powerful sorcerer

The Cŵn Annwn (by Davies up North)

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