i can’t express how much id kill or die for jeremy mayer’s typewriter bird sculptures
(x)
It’s so difficult to find a good photo of a charcoal peacock, but here’s a charcoal blackshoulder someone posted to one of my groups. Usually their wings are grey and it’s hard to tell that the bird isn’t also grey instead of black (most photos are overexposed in order to see detail), but in person, they are a black based bird.
Charcoal peafowl are a mutation that shouldn’t be bred forward; their lifespans are often half what a normal peafowl’s is, and the hens are all sterile. It survives and continues to be bred because people like melanistic birds. Charcoal is propagated via breeding the males to hens that are heterozygous for the mutation, which for many breeders often means breeding a male to a wild type hen, and then breeding the het charcoal hen offspring back to their father.
Reminder that if you are located in any of the areas with a dot, especially green or yellow, you need to take your bird feeders and bird baths down. If you have cats and dogs, watch them closely while they play outside to ensure they don’t find and eat a sick/dead bird in your backyard as this is fatal to furry friends as well. If you have pet birds or poultry, take extreme caution to wear different shoes between each bird area, don’t get any new birds until the virus burns itself out, and disinfect or discard any potential fomites any time they come into contact with one of your birds or anywhere outside that could be contaminated by wild bird feces.
Bird flu is spreading rapidly. Please search for “bird flu” + your area and see if it has reached you.
Beware of the forbidden jacuzzi! If Lolita sees water, she wants to bathe in it. If it’s water coming out of the sink, in a tea cup, bowl, pot - she’s drawn to it. Always know where your birds are before operating the stove.
@is-the-parrot-video-cute is this ok or is that parakeet getting territorial
Rating: cute
If this cockatiel was truly being territorial it would be trying to attack the other bird.
You may also notice that it is not hurting the person’s hand, and is certainly not trying to bite them, this is not aggressive behaviour. This behaviour is called beaking (using the beak to interact with another individual in a play/non-aggressive way). The yellow cockatiel is simply trying to get the person’s attention, kinda like poking someone repeatedly until they pay attention to you. It’s not aggressive, just a little bit demanding.
You might also notice that when the person takes their hand away from the white cockatiel, it bows its head and moves closer to their hand. Both of these birds want cuddles, they just have very different personalities and different ways of asking.
Mochi donning his hazmat suit to protect him from the evil FUMES. Bird safety becomes an issue when these items are heated. The toxic fumes can lead to X▾X.
Not only is it harmful to birds, but to humans and the environment, as well.
Last Week Tonight did a whole episode on it. You can also do your own research.
PFOA/PTFE/Teflon™ is hidden in all sorts of everyday items. It can be found in pots & pans, cookie & muffin trays, George Forman Grills, waffle irons, electric skillets, certain crockpots, rice-cookers, heavy-duty aluminum foil, irons, ironing boards, glue guns, space heaters, some heat lamps… It’s pretty crazy.
If it’s heated, check the manufacturer’s website to see if it contains PTFE and/or PFOA.
The self-cleaning cycle on your oven can have similar harmful effects but for different reasons. New ovens have chemical residue that needs to be burned off before introducing your birds back into your home.
I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.
The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don’t have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.
And then there’s the kea, straight-up titled “clown of the mountains”, that has a specific vocalization for “playtime!”. Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go “great idea, disembodied voice! it’s TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!” and start wrestling.
Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he’s shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.
keuhkopussirotta
It’s your first day of Bird University and you already fucking hate this guy.
So there’s this gene in humans called PLXNC1 or “Plexin”, right? So Plexin is associated with increased neuron function and is generally thought to be correlated to human’s increased cognitive ability for the use of language, i.e., “language learning”. Super cool, right?
Humans aren’t the only animals with advanced language learning that have Plexin in their genome. We can actually find homologous plexin between humans and PARROTS!
Using genomic alignment search tools, we can actually break down the sequence of human Plexin and directly compare it to PARROT Plexin. This was actually a project I ran for an upper division genomics class, and running the program literally takes like ten minutes. I wanted to see how similar the plexin gene was between humans and parrots, so I queued up the human sequence against all of the available records from parrots sequences and sorted by greatest percent identity (i.e., which bird species had the closest plexin to ours?)
It was this funky dude right here:
THAT’S RIGHT BABY! The kea, notorious for being a straight up motherfucking prank god, carries Plexin with a 79.42% identity comapred to humans’.
THIS LITTLE ASSHOLE HAS A HOMOLOGOUS LANGUAGE LEARNING GENE WITH US. A GENE THAT IS THOUGHT TO BE CORRELATED TO HIGHER LEVEL LEARNING AND INTELLIGENCE. AND THEY USE THEIR INTELLIGENCE TO WREAK HAVOC ON TOURISTS
Also these guys have been found to literally have predictive reasoning skills, which we consider REALLY FUCKING ADVANCED for a lot of animal species. They pass the Aesop’s fable test with flying colors. They’re so goddamn cool, I love them so much. The kea really said: “I will use my superior intelligence to have a good fucking time” and that’s so powerful honestly