I adore my jays. I switched feeding strategies in my backyard to a trough-style feeder to make extra room for the little birds and prevent the Jays from bullying everyone else out.
One cool thing I’ve noticed is the Jays acting like a (very loud) lookout alarm for all the other species. The Jays scream, and everyone runs away and hides. I’ve seen it when the hawk comes poking around, and once when a cat found its way onto my deck.
Hell yeah, little Jay, get it!
They’re such ugly little vultures under all that floof, I love it
So mean!!
I’ve never seen this in real life, but I have seen like half a dozen sparrows chasing around a hawk that was stalking one of their nests. It was interesting to see the cooperation. “Not today, Satan!”
I don’t know where OP is, but here in Massachusetts, we have no sales tax on groceries:
https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/massachusetts/sales-tax-exemptions
Hahaha, thank you I needed that laugh
I can feel the sneeze being restrained here
Oh great, now I’m over here googling pictures of various owl feet 😂
Given what I’ve seen, I’m also gonna go with my neighborhood buddy, GHO
What an adorable perfect family 🥰
Nice! Thank you
Ooooh, must be someone from an instance I don’t federate with because I don’t see another comment on this thread. Lemmy is weird
Aww, owl kissy faces 💕
And turns out they mate for life, so that’s an owl married couple.
“the small animals can cool their internal temperature by 10°C to 30°C. This slows their metabolism by as much as 95% and protects them from starvation”
Holy crap, that’s insane!
I recently learned that part of birds’ winter survival strategy is to just straight up burn fat by shivering to generate heat. And that they eat and burn a huge number of calories (in bird terms) in a single cold day to be able to do that. It’s why I’m extra vigilant about my bird feeders when it gets extra cold up here in New England.
https://swibirds.org/blog/birds-in-cold
I can imagine having that extra chonk padding in winter allows the owls some margin of safety, in case they struggle to find enough calories in the moment when the weather gets really nasty.
Yeah my life doesn’t leave me a lot of room for creating posts. I know how much work that takes.
But I’m good at running my mouth, so I try to comment these days because I know that engagement drives engagement. (I have no idea what drives post visibility on Lemmy though. Is there an algorithm here?)
I’m not working tomorrow, so I’ll have time to read some research! But I’ll never argue with funny adorable owl pics of any sort either haha
Oh interesting! I had never heard of BirdNet or Bird Pi. It looks like Cornell Lab integrated that machine learning project into the Merlin app:
Merlin also sound identifies a Northern Flicker in the woods behind my house that I’ve yet to see.
And yes educational! It was your long form posts from a couple months ago that really drew me into the community. I was just really impressed with the level of detail and really appreciated it. I like learning new things that I wouldn’t necessarily take the time to seek out myself. I was reading those even though I didn’t comment much at the time.
Birds. I guess it doesn’t feel that niche because I know lots of people are into bird watching, but it’s my thing.
There’s this app called Merlin that I swear to god is magic. You can just open your mic and it’ll listen to and identify all of the birds you’re hearing.
And it really works! For the longest time, it kept identifying a Carolina Wren in my yard, and I thought it was just wrong. I’ll be damned if I didn’t eventually see that wren, and now it frequents the bird feeder I set up on my deck. It’s just my shyest bird. But the app knew it was out there.
I’ve learned so much about birds and identifying them from using the app. And I’ve gotten really into how, when, and what to feed birds because I want to find more different kinds, and I just love watching them on the deck interacting. I call it my cat TV haha
I’m also learning a ton about owls specifically over on the superbowl@lemmy.world community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @anon6789@lemmy.world makes the most amazing educational posts. It’s a lot of fun.
Creepy freakazoid under cute floofy camouflage? Yep, that checks out