Birds

0bleak

Well-known member
some fucking American "nature artist" tried to eat every bird he ever painted


The interesting thing is that the most well-known org for the protection of birds here is named after him, and that's not the only controversy about that man, and that the Aududon Society is named after him.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
The two like this I often think of are that whale they call the world's loneliest because its call's a different frequency to the others and that photo of the last Barbary lion in the Atlas mountains.

12p2fdhcc8t11.jpg
definitely a photo that stays in your mind. as someone else pointed out, there's something haunting about the way it's walking out of frame. leaving our world for the world of myth.

(tangentially related, but i didn't realize until recently how significant the discovery of whale song was in the history of field recording, with this record becoming an unexpected hit in the early 70s. an allmusic review contends that "something about these initial recordings . . . continues to stand above all other similar efforts" and i sort of get what they mean. funny to think of blissblogger's thing about breakthrough aura applying to recordings of nature...)

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The two like this I often think of are that whale they call the world's loneliest because its call's a different frequency to the others and that photo of the last Barbary lion in the Atlas mountains.

12p2fdhcc8t11.jpg

There's Lonely George the last galapagos tortoise or something - or the last of his particular type thereof - and that albatross believed last of its kind that flies around the world looking fruitlessly for a mate. Also I think there is a photo of (probably) the last Tasmanian tiger in a zoo somewhere unaware his species had been hunted to extinction.

The lion looks as though it's on a beach, about to do a Reginald Perrin.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
There's Lonely George the last galapagos tortoise or something - or the last of his particular type thereof - and that albatross believed last of its kind that flies around the world looking fruitlessly for a mate.

Actually I'm slightly wrong on that one

Thouggtt to be the only albatross of its kind in the Northern Hemisphere Albie, a very lonely Black-Browed Albatross, has returned to RSPB Bempton Cliffs.

This magnificent long-distance traveller from the south Atlantic, with a wingspan of over 2.4m, has been living in the Baltic Seas around Denmark and Germany since 2014 after being blown off course from the South Atlantic oceans. It has remained in the Baltic area ever since, making occasional forays across the North Sea to RSPB Bempton Cliffs, near Flamborough, East Yorkshire, where it was first spotted in the summer of 2017. Nobody really knows why it travels across to Bempton Cliffs but it makes it very special for UK birdwatchers as albatrosses would normally never be seen here!

Albie disappeared after the summer in 2017 but reappeared at Bempton in the summers of 2020 and 2021. However, this year Albie turned up again at Bempton really early in the spring and is still there now as we go into August!

Albatrosses rarely flap their wings, relying on aerodynamic glider-like wings to carry them along with prevailing winds. It’s highly unlikely that this bird will ever make it back to the southern oceans because of the effort it would take to fly against prevailing winds and flap across windless equatorial regions. Sadly, Albie is almost certainly destined to remain single in a foreign place with only Gannets (almost his size!) as companions! RSPB Bempton Cliffs isn’t a bad place to visit and hang out with one’s “Gannety” chums!
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Years ago during a Saturday shift of listening to whining old people who didn't know what an ampersand is - KLUNK! what the fuck! Is someone throwing bricks at the window? - I rushed to the source of the noise and noticed a bloody smear on the glass - on closer inspection I spotted a pigeon thrashing around on the grass outside - despite my childhood dream of being a veterinarian, there was no way I was touching that disease ridden mass of feathers, so a colleague phoned up the RSPCA only to be told "we won't help, pigeons are vermin, leave it to die" and who were we to ignore the words of an expert? On the plus side it probably made a filling meal for one of the seagulls...
 
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