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tinylongwing · 2 days
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Before I head back to Rota, I will be on Saipan for a few days. Canario here (Golden White-eye) is an endangered species found only on Saipan and Aguijan, though it probably was also on Tinian and Rota in the past. Their thrush-like habits and songs are very unlike most other white-eyes.
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tinylongwing · 14 days
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Fieldwork here on Rota is well underway, with about half of our mist-netting lanes and trails marked and prepped for next month's bird banding. But along the way, we find all kinds of incredible landscapes and hidden treasures.
Top left: A WWII Japanese artillery gun sunk into a manmade cave in a limestone wall. The old gun is being overtaken by the jungle and has ferns and moss growing all over the barrel.
Top right: An old wrecked boat inside the lagoon on Rota's northwestern shore, with brilliant blue sky above and turquoise water below.
Bottom left: Guam Coenogyne, a rare endangered orchid found only on Rota and Guam. This white flower with a red center emerges from a swirl of large bulbs with leaves that cling to the bark of a mossy tree.
Bottom right: An unbroken green glass bottle that originally held soy sauce, from sometime in the 1920s-40s when Rota was a Japanese colony.
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tinylongwing · 15 days
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Fieldwork here on Rota is well underway, with about half of our mist-netting lanes and trails marked and prepped for next month's bird banding. But along the way, we find all kinds of incredible landscapes and hidden treasures.
Top left: A WWII Japanese artillery gun sunk into a manmade cave in a limestone wall. The old gun is being overtaken by the jungle and has ferns and moss growing all over the barrel.
Top right: An old wrecked boat inside the lagoon on Rota's northwestern shore, with brilliant blue sky above and turquoise water below.
Bottom left: Guam Coenogyne, a rare endangered orchid found only on Rota and Guam. This white flower with a red center emerges from a swirl of large bulbs with leaves that cling to the bark of a mossy tree.
Bottom right: An unbroken green glass bottle that originally held soy sauce, from sometime in the 1920s-40s when Rota was a Japanese colony.
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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Before I head back to Rota, I will be on Saipan for a few days. Canario here (Golden White-eye) is an endangered species found only on Saipan and Aguijan, though it probably was also on Tinian and Rota in the past. Their thrush-like habits and songs are very unlike most other white-eyes.
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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Back to the Marianas next week! Here are two field sketchbook pages I didn't manage to post yet, of fanihi (Mariana fruit bat) and sali (Micronesian Starling).
Fanihi were kind of everywhere on Rota, and I saw more of them in five days there than I have in all my time working on Saipan over the years. It's good to know that their population is healthy there, though the locals said that they were seeing them more than usual also because of a behavioral change. Typhoons in 2023 had stripped the trees of flowers and fruit and delayed the new fruiting season, so part of the reason fanihi were so visible was that they were spending a lot more time than before having to find food.
Pretty important when doing any kind of science to keep behavior and detectability in mind - seeing more bats doesn't always mean there are more bats, just that they may be more visible than normal for other reasons.
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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Back to the Marianas next week! Here are two field sketchbook pages I didn't manage to post yet, of fanihi (Mariana fruit bat) and sali (Micronesian Starling).
Fanihi were kind of everywhere on Rota, and I saw more of them in five days there than I have in all my time working on Saipan over the years. It's good to know that their population is healthy there, though the locals said that they were seeing them more than usual also because of a behavioral change. Typhoons in 2023 had stripped the trees of flowers and fruit and delayed the new fruiting season, so part of the reason fanihi were so visible was that they were spending a lot more time than before having to find food.
Pretty important when doing any kind of science to keep behavior and detectability in mind - seeing more bats doesn't always mean there are more bats, just that they may be more visible than normal for other reasons.
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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Philippine Collared-Dove (Streptopelia dusumieri). Declining in their home range (Philippines), but quite common in villages of the Northern Mariana Islands where they were introduced sometime in the 1700s. Now considered naturalized, they're charming & sort of goofy with their hoarse cooing from the power lines and coconut palms.
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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Philippine Collared-Dove (Streptopelia dusumieri). Declining in their home range (Philippines), but quite common in villages of the Northern Mariana Islands where they were introduced sometime in the 1700s. Now considered naturalized, they're charming & sort of goofy with their hoarse cooing from the power lines and coconut palms.
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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I keep track of intergrade Northern Flickers in my yard because I have so many I'm constantly tripping the ebird filter on the counts. Here are the individuals for this winter so far that I can distinguish.
Northern Flickers typically are either Red-shafted (North America west of the Rocky Mountains) or Yellow-shafted (North America east of the Rocky Mountains) but there's a large zone of overlap where they interbreed. The offspring are known as intergrades, not hybrids, because they're still the same species but a mix of subspecies types.
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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Finally, I’m so excited to get to announce the project I spent all of last winter and spring on! Birdwatcher is now up on kickstarter! This is a board game where you get to play as a photographer trying to document the birds of paradise. Check it out here!
The cover features a male Blue Bird-of-Paradise in his unusual upside-down display pose trying to court a female, surrounded by the lush vegetation of their home range in New Guinea.
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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Centrocercus urophasianus - Lauren Helton
For Month of Love 2019: Blindness
While many birds use sound to attract mates, the Greater Sage Grouse provides a dramatic example of the use of acoustics. Males gather in leks and their complex series of booms, pops, and whistles produced in part by the males’ inflatable air sacs which are exposed during the dancing ritual. Females rely on these strange sounds to locate males across broad expanses of sagebrush and desert grasses, and judge them based on the quality of their acoustics.
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tinylongwing · 1 month
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When I die, I'm comin' right on back for you, valentine.
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tinylongwing · 2 months
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Happy Valentine's Day! This piece of mine from the 2019 Month of Love challenge shows you how to win your valentine over with great success - give them the biggest bug you can as a sign of your love!
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tinylongwing · 2 months
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Pardon the dust! I've just moved my shop to INPRNT and am working on uploading prints for purchase. INPRNT offers high-quality prints and right now, this weekend, there's an additional sale going on, too!
They do not offer some of the fun things soc6 had (pillows, mugs) but on the plus side, they aren't asking me to pay them to host my prints, and aren't completely robbing my cut of sales (honestly, my last "paycheck" from soc6 was 31 cents!!!). If you're interested in a print, check it out!
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tinylongwing · 2 months
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Ga'ga karisu, Saipan Reed-Warbler (Acrocephalus hiwae) is a critically endangered species found in the Northern Mariana Islands. Though few remain due to habitat loss, they fill the air with their rich melodic songs in those places where they can still hold on.
Their closest relative, the Nightingale Reed-Warbler of Guam, is extinct due to habitat loss and the invasive brown tree snake.
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