Weeping with unrestrained joy at the aquarium because I saw a fish

Maybe the real treasure was the boops we made along the way

Common Raven (Corvus corax) teasing a gull (Larus spp) - series by Sandra Gilchrist

According to the photographer, the raven eventually left and the gull seemed no worse for wear after the interaction. 

Do y’all wanna hear about some absolutely crazy shit going down in the birding world right now

Three friends share a carcass at Potrero Ranch outside of Kingsville, TX, USA.

Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus), family Cathartidae, order Accipitriformes

Harris Hawk's aka Bay-winged Hawk (Parabuteo unicinctus), family Accipitridae, order Accipitriformes

Crested Caracara (Caracara plancus cheriway), family Falconidae, order Falconiformes

photograph by Josefina Espinosa Salumunek  

Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus) - photo by Jeff Dyck

During the 2008 recession, my aunt lost her job. Her, her partner, and my three cousins moved across the country to stay with us while they got back on their feet. My house turned from a family of four to a family of nine overnight, complete with three dogs and five cats between us.

It took a few years for them to get a place of their own, but after a few rentals and apartments, they now own a split level ranch in a town nearby. I’ve lost track of how many coworkers and friends have stayed with them when they were in a tight spot. A mother and son getting out of an abusive relationship, a divorcee trying to stay local for his kids while they work out a custody agreement, you name it. My aunt and uncle knew first hand what that kindness meant, and always find space for someone who needed it, the way my parents had for them.

That same aunt and uncle visited me in [redacted] city last year. They are prolific drinkers, so we spent most of the day bar hopping. As we wandered the city, any time we passed a homeless person, my uncle would pull out a fresh cigarette and ask them if they had a light. Regardless of if they had a lighter on hand or not, he offered them a few bucks in exchange, which he explained to me after was because he felt it would be easier for them to accept in exchange for a service, no matter how small.

I work for a company that produces a lot of fabric waste. Every few weeks, I bring two big black trash bags full of discarded material over to a woman who works down the hall. She distributes them to local churches, quilting clubs, and teachers who can use them for crafts. She’s currently in the process of working with our building to set up a recycling program for the smaller pieces of fabric that are harder to find use for.

One of my best friends gives monthly donations to four or five local organizations. She’s fortunate enough to have a tech job that gives her a good salary, and she knows that a recurring donation is more valuable to a non-profit because they can rely on that money month after month, and can plan ways to stretch that dollar for maximum impact. One of those organizations is a native plant trust, and once she’s out of her apartment complex and in a home with a yard, she has plans to convert it into a haven of local flora.

My partner works for a company that is working to help regulate crypto and hold the current bad actors in the space accountable for their actions. We unfortunately live in a time where technology develops far too fast for bureaucracy to keep up with, but just because people use a technology for ill gain doesn’t mean the technology itself is bad. The blockchain is something that she finds fascinating and powerful, and she is using her degree and her expertise to turn it into a tool for good.

I knew someone who always had a bag of treats in their purse, on the odd chance they came across a stray cat or dog, they had something to offer them.

I follow artists who post about every local election they know of, because they know their platform gives them more reach than the average person, and that they can leverage that platform to encourage people to vote in elections that get less attention, but in many ways have more impact on the direction our country is going to go.

All of this to say, there’s more than one way to do good in the world. Social media leads us to believe that the loudest, the most vocal, the most prolific poster is the most virtuous, but they are only a piece of the puzzle. (And if virtue for virtues sake is your end goal, you’ve already lost, but that’s a different post). Community is built of people leveraging their privileges to help those without them. We need people doing all of those things and more, because no individual can or should do all of it. You would be stretched too thin, your efforts valiant, but less effective in your ambition.

None of this is to encourage inaction. Identify your unique strengths, skills, and privileges, and put them to use. Determine what causes are important to you, and commit to doing what you can to help them. Collective action is how change is made, but don’t forget that we need diversity in actions taken.

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

Spirits in birds. A tribute to a beloved and very sweary aunt.

have you heard? conservationists have reintroduced 10 kākāpō onto the north island of new zealand!

"For the first time, genetically modified pig kidneys provided “life-sustaining kidney function” during the course of a planned seven-day clinical study—a first step in addressing the critical crisis worldwide of kidney donor organ shortage.

The University of Alabama’s pre-clinical human study at Birmingham also advances the science and promise of xenotransplantation as a therapy to potentially cure end-stage kidney disease—just as a human-to-human transplants can.

“It has been truly extraordinary to see the first-ever preclinical demonstration that appropriately modified pig kidneys can provide normal, life-sustaining kidney function in a human safely and be achieved using a standard immunosuppression regimen,” said UAB transplant surgeon scientist Jayme Locke, M.D., director of UAB’s Comprehensive Transplant Institute and lead author of the paper...

The peer-reviewed findings published last month in JAMA Surgery describes the pioneering pre-clinical human research performed on a recipient experiencing brain death...

The pre-clinical human brain death model developed at UAB can evaluate the safety and feasibility of pig-to-human kidney xenografts, or transplants, without risk to a living human. It is named for transplant pioneer Jim Parsons, an organ donor whose family generously donated his body to advance xenotransplant kidney research, like the latest patient did.

A Critical Need

Kidney disease kills more people each year than breast or prostate cancer, while more than 90,000 people are on the transplant waiting list. More than 800,000 Americans are living with kidney failure and 240 Americans on dialysis die every day. The wait for a deceased donor kidney can be as long as five to 10 years, and almost 5,000 people per year die waiting for a kidney transplant.

Groundbreaking Study Details

The 52-year-old study subject for this research lived with hypertension and stage 2 chronic kidney disease, which affects more than one in seven U.S. adults, or an estimated 37 million Americans. As part of this study, the subject had both of his native kidneys removed and dialysis stopped, followed by a crossmatch-compatible xenotransplant with two 10 gene-edited pig kidneys, or UKidney.

The transplanted pig kidneys made urine within four minutes of re-perfusion and produced more than 37 liters of urine in the first 24 hours. The pig kidneys continued to function as they would in a living human for the entirety of the seven-day study. Also, the kidneys were still viable at the time the study was concluded.

“In the first 24 hours these kidneys made over 37 liters of urine,” said Dr. Locke. “It was really a remarkable thing to see.” ...

Gene editing in pigs to reduce immune rejection has made organ transplants from pigs to humans possible. The natural lifespan of a pig is 30 years, they are easily bred, and they have organs of similar size to humans. Genetically modified pig kidneys have been extensively tested in non-human primates, and the addition of UAB’s preclinical human research model—the Parsons Model—now provides important information about the safety and efficacy of kidneys in human transplant recipients."

-via Good News Network, September 17, 2023

Hōkū Cody began journeying to the islands of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in 2013. […] Cody is part of a cultural working group that advocates on behalf of Native Hawaiians in Papahānaumokuākea, which encompasses the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. After over a century of militarization and destructive colonial projects in the region, beginning with James Cook’s arrival on the main islands in 1778, a crucial avenue of that reclamation is researching and creating Hawaiian names that were lost during this period of Western encroachment. 

“For us in Hawai‘i, a name is everything,” says Cody. “A name says that you’ve acknowledged that existence and that life.” 

This past December [2020], that acknowledgement was extended to four species of seabirds – the last of the 21 seabirds in Papahānaumokuākea to receive a Hawaiian name. “They are Hawaiian birds, they should have a Hawaiian name,” says Cody. […]

The names were developed through the cultural working group’s nomenclature subcommittee, which since 2012 has brought together an array of experts, including cultural practitioners, scholars, resource managers, and scientists.

Pualani Kanaka‘ole Kanahele, an esteemed kūpuna, or elder, helped guide the group. “When we got stuck,” says Cody, “she flipped us on our head and asked us a different question in a different way, and helped us move along in the thought process.” Kanahele, otherwise known as Aunty Pua, is a key figure for Papahānaumokuākea; in 2007, she developed the monument’s name.

——-

When renaming the Bonin petrel, Cody drew on her own experiences in the field, where she witnessed the sky blacken with the swarming birds as they returned to the islands to breed. Her account of their epic congregations led the group to the word nunulu, a Hawaiian word meaning growling, warbling, or reverberating.

Another committee member, Noah Gomes, called on his expertise researching historical Hawaiian texts and taxonomic systems; in 2017, he uncovered the name of an endemic songbird, ‘alawī, which had been lost for over a century. In similar fashion, Gomes, a research consultant for the Kamehameha Schools of Hawai‘i, located the traditional name for the Tristram’s storm petrel – ʻakihikeʻehiʻale – in a Hawaiian scholarly text published in 1860. […]

Unlike its English counterpart, named after a British ornithologist, ʻakihikeʻehiʻale translates to “the bird that steps on water” and alludes to how the bird patters its feet on the ocean’s surface as it feeds. Gomes says Hawaiian names often convey information about a species, while Hawaiian taxonomic systems can impart how birds have been traditionally perceived. […]

For the Christmas shearwater, the group chose the onomatopoeic ʻaoʻū to evoke the bird’s nocturnal flight call.

Notably, the blue-gray noddy was given two names: hinaokū and manuohina. In Hawaiian, a species can have multiple names to correspond, for instance, with stages of growth or behavioral differences, says Cody. For the blue-gray noddy, the group settled on two names to collectively encompass the bird’s full suite of characteristics, from its gray color (hina) to the fact that it forages close to shore.

——-

While the era of exploitation in the archipelago has passed, sea-level rise remains a critical threat to the islands’ seabirds. Most of the land in Papahānaumokuākea rises less than two meters above water, and two of the newly named species, the nunulu and ʻakihikeʻehiʻale, are especially vulnerable. […]

“When you speak of that bird now, you’re going to speak of the multitudes and you’re going to give it that power,” says Cody. […]

“It is because of endangerment of our language that we have taken action to bring our language back to life,” says Larry Kimura, a Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies expert at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. He says it’s very encouraging to see the cultural working group’s effort to rename plants and animals in the archipelago. “It’s important that we have Hawaiian names that we can bring back to life […].”

——-

Headline, image, caption, and text published by: Jason Gregg. “Decolonizing Seabirds.” Hakai Magazine. 12 May 2021.

I have made a new UQuiz:

What your opinions on dinosaurs say about you.

Have fun (it's a long one)

Your paragraph about your mom, my own situation is echoing that. I'm lucky in a lot of ways--she had a will she updated just a year ago, she made sure I knew about having medical power of attorney and what her final wishes were so I didn't have to make the hardest decision at the hospital, I just had to see her wishes enacted. (And then deal with what that meant, but. Yeah.) The fact that she did these things for me helped a lot because her sudden decline started with a stroke that affected her speech. That made it really hard to talk about complicated things even without the emotional burden of it, so we didn't. And now I'm here after being at a funeral home this afternoon overwhelmed by how much things cost and how awful it is to sign the paperwork and yet I knew to ask for 10 death certificates when the funeral director asked how many, I would have had no idea without reading this and I was not prepared to go to a funeral home today. This guide first crossed my dash after she suffered that stroke. Not wanting to think about "what if she doesn't recover from this" but knowing it was a resource I might need, I tab-hoarded it. I'm glad I did, because this past not-quite-two months has been too little time to have left with her but more than enough time to make re-finding a tumblr post, even in your likes, a miserable exercise. Thank you for making this.

Hey you know how I said I was going to make a workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies? I actually did that.

HERE IS THE VERSION WITH LOTS OF SWEARING AT THE USELESS, SHITTY SITUATION YOU’RE IN.

HERE IS THE VERSION WITH A FAIR AMOUNT OF BLACK HUMOR BUT NO CURSEWORDS.

Featuring Helpful Sections such as:

Death Certificates – What you need, why you need them, and how to get them

Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone

What the Everloving Fuck is Probate

Some Simple Dos and Don’ts

Shitty Mad Libs – Templates for writing Obituaries and Memorials

How to plan a non-religious death party

So you suddenly have to become some sort of hacker or some shit

This is an eighteen page book that you can print out, download, share, and give away; it is meant to be used to collect information about funeral planning and account management after a death OR you can use it BEFORE you die and give people information so they’re not stuck playing Nancy Fucking Drew while trying to keep seventeen cousins who crawled out of the woodwork from gutting each other in front of the fucking casket as they argue about who’s inheriting grandma’s favorite dentures.

It’s not exactly cheerful and it’s full of things that are probably going to feel really fucking raw if you’re processing a fresh death.

I’m sorry! I love you! Death is shitty! I’m trying to laugh about it a little and I hope you can laugh a little too because otherwise we’re all just going to cry together.

Good luck!

(in memory of my weirdo mother and her weirdo siblings who all died too fucking young and left me holding this flaming bag of dogshit)