c/Superbowl
For all your owl related needs!
There is absolutely a place for both products. Impossible did exactly what they set out to do in flavor and texture mimicry. It's the one I tried first as a meat eater and that's what got me to try Beyond and a few others.
I hear the complaints about the fat and sodium in the products, and while it sounds less than ideal due a vegan or vegetarian diet, it doesn't sound that bad for an omnivore, especially one that eats less veg. The great thing about them being a manufactured product is both of those things can change through product development. I remember reading that Impossible went through numerous revisions to stand up to Burger King's conveyor belt grill system.
I'm very excited for the future of these types of products.
Nice, I must be doing something right
Out of all the things I've failed at, this is one of the one I regret the least! 😁
This is actually why I prefer the Beyond to Impossible. Both command a premium, and the Impossible is so indistinguishable that it feels like a waste of money. The Beyond has a great taste, but is not exactly beef flavor. They smell like cat food to me before they're cooked, but I find myself craving the taste now and again because it is something unique.
Correct!
Great Horned Owls will also eat porcupines.
No smallish creature is safe. Foxes, turkeys, bats, fish, scorpions, snakes, other owls. You name it and it's around owl size or smaller, an owls will eat it.
Skunk spray isn't great for their eyes though. Here is an owl in with skunk sprayed eyes.
It can cause irritation or ulceration, and then animals will rub at their eyes, potentially causing further physical damage.
I wouldn't mind if Lordi came to the US again. I got to see them once, but some drunk guy kept bumping into me the whole time so it was pretty distracting.
I like them best at the falling apart stage, so I bite the cookie, take a sip of milk, let them mingle, and then swallow. Delicious cookie cement, but no mess.
Kinda sounds gross to type out, but visually quite discrete.
A short time ago, I wouldn't have expected to want to cuddle a groundhog, but here I am....
We shall win them over! We've come a long way getting lots of people to accept oppossums and raccoons. A cute little groundhog is just an underground capybara, and the people love them nowadays too!
Ooo, what's my little score there?
I stumbled on someone's Fediverse stat tracker the other day and I saw this username was like the 27th top poster/commenter and it blew my mind! I feel my main subject matter is so niche. For someone who came here to lurk silently and not participate, I've really missed the goalpost! 😜
I'm honestly happy to have gotten to casually know so many of you. This place largely takes me back to the internet of 20-ish years ago. I wish we could get some cooler heads in the news/politics stuff, and the tensions between World and DB0 have been bumming me out lately, but otherwise most people here are top notch.
Good, I'm glad it is nothing serious. The bad pics I have seen look greatly unpleasant!
I am not the best at drinking the amount I'm supposed to either. It sounds like so much. I am guessing the hydration both keeps the pockets supple, so things fall out on their own, and the act of drinking is a natural flushing of them.
This isn't the topic I thought I'd be exploring today, but it has reminded me to check my tongue and tonsils, and I just like learning about stuff in general, so it's all good fun for me.
They are pockets, unfortunately. I actually just skimmed a reddit thread and someone mentioned a tonsil stone vacuum! I checked Amazon, and they seem to have a plethora of specialized tools. The battery-operated vacuum mentioned, what is essentially a straw on a bulb syringe for a manual vacuum, and specialized tonsil stone picks. Just search up tonsil stone remover and you may find something that looks tolerable.
If it's a persistent problem or something painful, it may be worth it to see an ENT to see if you should have your tonsils removed or if they can offer a solution that works. Things like mouth breathing, post nasal drip, and not staying hydrated can worsen accumulation of stones, so treating any of those conditions could also alleviate some of it.
It's really satisfying to both learn about our local wildlife, and also to see so many caring people all in one place while it feels like the world is going to hell. It has really made me appreciate my community and local environment.
The owls are beautiful and amazing, but they are also kinda the biggest a-hole cats you've ever met. The hawks and corvids are more "fun" since they are often curious and a bit more interactive with me in positive ways. We also have a wild bald eagle right now in addition to our ambassador bald eagle, and they are just undeniably impressive creatures to see up close. I'm also constantly surprised to see animals come in that I didn't even know lived in this part of the country. We had a Brown Thrasher, which is apparently called the Eastern Roadrunner because it runs around a lot on the ground. We also sometimes get minks and beavers from the very southern part of our county. With us being mainly suburban, I don't think of these guys still being so close to us. And there's tons of more somewhat ordinary animals like kinds of frogs and turtles I've never previously learned about.
This is a Diamondback Terrapin that prefers our one sink to the turtle tanks, so they called her Sadie Sink. The photo doesn't do her justice! The patterns on her skin and shell are so amazing!
Gargling can help prevent them or flush really tiny ones, but I have trouble gargling without choking and swallowing...double yuck.
You can use a syringe/water flosser set veeeery low to flush the tonsil pockets, or you can poke them out with a cotton swab or other soft poking device that you are unlikely to swallow if you gag yourself.
I don't find any of the methods really fun, but the few times I've done it, I thankfully have found very little in there, so I don't do it often.
You can get good pictures/videos easily on how to do it, but I don't even like looking at them, too big a tryptophobia and slimy germiness combo for me. It's pretty simple and quick though once you find a way that you can tolerate. The manual syringe or one of those bulbs for flushing your ears is what's I'd recommend for the best balance of control and effectiveness with least discomfort.
Can't say as it hasn't happened once or twice. 😅 I felt I had better control over it than the brush still.
Ppl involved should suffer (bad) consequences.
This is something that we need to be mindful of as rehab people.
The one rehab training video I've seen starts with this internet famous cat rehab lady going off on people. It then explains she can get away with that because people like cats and dogs. People are familiar with them, feel they understand them, and so on. People will keep helping cats and dogs even if this lady annoys them and lectures them. Wildlife rehabbers don't get that benefit, and trust me, some people will infuriate us by messing with nature, or are downright hostile to us for existing like we're as hated as the IRS or DMV or something. We have to wait until you leave for us to talk about how we really feel. Because helping wild animals is hard, inconvenient, expensive, and poorly understood. If we lecture people or tell you about how you sealed this animal's fate, people will never come back to us again. They will spread the word how trash we are and discourage others from helping animals.
And having to remain cool does help a bit too, I think. We can't undo the dumb people have already done, but hopefully we can get some better advice to sink in for next time. Honestly, it's hard to be mad at people who honestly think they were helping. It is nice to see these strangers pooling together and taking all this time and spending all this money to try to help. It would be many times over better if they would just leave it to the trained people and accept when something can't be saved. We don't enjoy putting animals down, but sometimes a humane end is the best we can offer if the damage is already done. Put that money and effort towards animals that aren't at the end of their lives. It's better for everyone, animals included. Once Timmy is tossed into the sea and that boat turns around and everyone goes back to ignoring whales, what did we really accomplish, even if he does swim away? If they aren't giving it actual medical help, they likely haven't tagged it or anything to see if this paid off.
I just want them to learn something. Develop a solid love for animals, learn to do things that actually do save them, get involved on a local or national level to help them, fund the people that do if they can't personally. They have the right mindset to make a positive difference, but stuff like this is just starting down the wrong path for what they want to accomplish, and for their sake and the animals, I don't like seeing that because it just goes poorly for everyone involved.
Templates to make my wood cutouts and to give the painter references.
Finished cutouts
Plushies next to their respective cutouts. The small Screech is larger, so she will be weighted as a female, and the Great Horned is a little small, so he'll be weighted to be a male.
First 4 painted by our artist. Exceeded my expectations!
Yes, I have really failed on staying anonymous. I've doxxed myself so much on here the only things I haven't really given you at some point is a face reveal and my real name. I chose the name as just a simple throwaway since I was planning to just be a lurker, but the community soon started dying and I didn't want to see that. I may have gone a bit overboard. 😅 You guys all seem to really love it though. I get so many DMs from people that really love what I share.
I never used to really think about them. I thought they were neat, but they never really took up much thought. My wife was the one that was a bigger fan, so one day I took her to a raptor rescue, and really getting to spend a bit of time around them apparently formed a connection. I would say I was still pretty normal about it until I started posting here. Then, after doing it every day, I really started to get an idea of how amazing these birds actually are. I've been doing this daily now for 3 years, and I still am learning new things about them on a regular basis. And starting last year, just reading and visiting wasn't enough, so I volunteered at my local rescue. We don't get too many owls since we're a bit more suburban, but I've gotten to handle a few, feed them, and I even got to release a rehabbed owl at our house on my wife's birthday! Our open house is the end of May, and I was supposed to get to hold one of our educational owls for 2 whole days and how it to people and teach them about it, but they sadly both passed of old age over the winter! 😢 I've gotten 2 life sized plushes that are fairly anatomically accurate I will be weighting to bring them up to realistic weight for our state's 2 most common owls, so people will be able to hold a realistic facsimile since people aren't allowed to touch our animals, and I also made 8 life sized cutouts that one of our artists is painting for me so people can see all the owls of our state together in one place. I'll add pics in a moment of what I have so far.
I do not believe I am on the spectrum, I think I just love learning, but as it's a spectrum, who the heck knows. I'm at an age before diagnosing these things was a regular thing if it wasn't severe. My lifelong best friend is totally what was formally known as Aspergers, I think it's just properly called Autism Spectrum Disorder nowadays, and after learning about it, I feel it benefit him to not be labeled something like that back in the 80s when we were kids and it still seemed heavily stigmatized, because now he's a college science professor, head of the science dept, and is debating becoming dean of the school. I don't think that would have happened if he got shuffled off to special classes back in our day. I've just always been bookish, fairly introverted, and had a lifelong love of learning. I don't feel anything inherent about me has ever given me issue to the point I'd be diagnosed with something, but autism doesn't seem to be looked at the way it was decades ago. I love hearing people talk about their passions, so it doesn't matter to me if someone is on the spectrum or not.
This reply looks long so I'm going to shut up now and find you some of my project pictures.
I did a Google news search for "buckelwal" (German for the humback whale) and there is no shortage of articles. Every actual expert seems really bothered by what is going on.
Yikes, this sounded exciting at first, but after reading a few German news articles, this sounds like a total mess.
I'm glad to see people excited about trying to help an animal, even at great expense, but good intentions don't make animals healthy again. After seeing comments from actual marine biologists and others actually qualified to speak to the health of this animal, it doesn't look like there's actually been any medical checks on the whale, just "vibes."
Working at a wildlife rescue, we see so many people further injure and often kill animals by attempting to help on their own. They aren't built like us, have very different medical and dietary needs than us, and so on. It is very sad to see.
We always have to weigh the price of any potential cure against the misery that animal will be in while we attempt to make it better. It is one of the hardest parts of the job, but as the marine biologist in this article said, some animals die. We wouldn't suggest humans be subject to this type of treatment, and most of us wouldn't support keeping someone who is suffering alive longer than they are truly viable, but yet most will have no issue with what is essentially doing unscientific experimentation on a suffering animal.
If this works out, great, but like any other medical thing, we have trained experts for a reason, and not liking what they have to say doesn't change the reality.
Whale researcher and marine biologist Fabian Ritter, co-founder of the association M.E.E.R., expressed clear skepticism to NDR. His biggest concern: the noise. "What worries me is the volume. That will be very loud for the whale. And whales and dolphins live in a world of sound. They are extremely sensitive." He compared it to holding a bright lamp in a person's face for three days. He also lacks a blood sample or an analysis of the blowing air so far. (Source)
He looked at me funny after I told him not to.
Thankfully I've only been in the building once so far when a skunk decided to blast us. The skunk baby was usually sweet and easygoing, but he sprayed 3 or 4 times in the clinic in a week.
It turned out the one pair of gloves (the orange ones) would freak it out and it would blast whomever was going to grab it. At least it was so small it barely had any booty juice, but skunk smell indoors is no joke. 🤢