Design and Evaluation of an Agency-Based Parrot-to-Parrot Video-Calling System for Interspecies Ethical Enrichment. | Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
This feels both sweet and appalling that social creatures are kept as solitary pets 🫤🦜
“Our study shows that by calling out jackdaws effectively ‘cast a vote’ and, when calling reaches a sufficient level, a mass departure takes place.”
David Attenborough takes us into the remarkable lives of hummingbirds via stunning slow motion photography. Everything about these tiny birds is superb and extreme. They have the highest metabolism, fastest heart beat and most rapid wing beat in the avian world. They evolved to feed on flowering plants but are now a crucial part of wider ecosystems. How do they mate, raise their young, and live?
Swan’s reaction to human returning home.. 😊 pic.twitter.com/gpabGHWFUo
With their quadruple personalities, those little brown birds at your feeder are a lot more interesting than they might appear.
I am not a bird person but this is legit fascinating. They buried the juicy bit down at the bottom of the article.
Field researchers noticed over 25 years of research that the two color morphs of this species *nearly always* cross-breed with each other, so they dug into the genetics and discovered a supergene that influences hormones that influences behavior to the point where there are effectively FOUR sexes of these birds!
(Actually good) explainer video from the original paper:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01562-6
(Go go basic science research! Sometimes you need to look at things close enough to realize there’s something interesting going on — originally they thought the morphs were juveniles!)
In Barkman’s debut print collection, False Knees fans will find old favorites along with an abundance of all-new material. Featuring creatures found in the author’s native Ontario, this always sharp, sometimes head-scratchingly bizarre collection of comics offers a view into the secret, surprisingly insightful world of blue jays, squirrels, geese, wolves, and rabbits.
Delightful. He nails the animal expressions and poses, which adds to the humor of juxtaposed anthropomorphism. I feel like my natural history background added another level of appreciation to several of the comics. None were laugh out loud funny for me but I enjoyed the whole book.
This is fun, one day I would love to design a riso print! I like that you use for density for shading and also enjoy how people stack two colors for a third. Like letterpress but a different vibe.