Do you birdwatch, casually or seriously? Do you have birds? Did you see a neat bird today? Tell me about your bird experiences.
on a more relevant note, i saw a really pretty cardinal while i was driving on a local country road recently
@Ipuntya I wonder if that would be any less wtf if I knew anything about TF2. @taxonomicAtrocity Chickens! Are they laying hens? I got to collect eggs once and it was one of the most tactilely amazing experiences of my life.
@budgie one of them still lays on occasion! but i'm down to one roo, one middle-aged hen, and one old lady hen 8(
Hello yes birds I currently have 10 ducks, most are old ladies or heading in that direction, there's a few middle-age girls who are laying, and one drake, George, who is a bit of a dick. Spoiler: duck pics Me and Dee - yep, I'm a grand champion county fair 4-H poultry/small animal showman :P BABIES! this was a few years ago. Plastic snow sleds make pretty good first swimming pools for baby ducks. I will yell more about birds later
Birb!! I recently moved from a place with no cardinals to a place with cardinals, so I get very excited when I see them. Also, my housemates have 4 ducklings and 6 goslings. I will try to post pics when I can! There is also 1 adult duck, he is not friendly.
i've lived in a place with cardinals my whole life, i don't think that excitement goes away. they are so red and good and did i mention how red they are? it's amazing.
oh hey a thread about me (০▿০) okay but yes i do in fact like birbs. i look at a lot of birds on the internet and would one day like a little flock of my own! but alas, my current lease doesn't allow it. anyway have one of my favourite internet birds, max the cockatoo. he is very good.
@taxonomicAtrocity What magnificent floofs! Macklemore practically looks like he's got a mane. @An Actual Bird I am triple plus super shocked to find out that you like birds.
i love birds! but birds trigger my sensory issues/misophonia to hell and back so unfortunately i don't think owning a bird is something i could ever do again in the future. i'd pretty much have to have them far far away from most of my general existing spaces and that wouldn't be fair to a social creature :/ something like chickens might be fun but unfortunately i'm not really in a situation where that's possible anyway. maybe one day. for now i mostly do like to do some casual bird watching along hikes. i'd really like to actually Get Into It and buy some nice binoculars and maybe some bird guides someday. when we move from apartment to house sometime in the near future i'll likely set up a feeder or two in the yard. but that's about the extent of my current bird-ing. i'm super sad i really can't have them as pets though. my parents had a meyer's parrot for about a year and it would drive me into rages that weren't healthy for me and wasn't fair on the bird who was just making sounds. they of course refused to take my feelings into account at all and would often egg him on to scream and trigger me. unfortunately the poor little guy died after only a year, because of course my parents did not listen to me despite me being the only one who did any research into pet bird care even though he wasn't my pet, and wouldn't keep his cage out of/away from the kitchen and i think fumes may have really messed with his health. he was a good boy who deserved better. i actually kind of miss him because despite him triggering me he also really, really liked me and i feel like quite a bit of his screaming was just him trying to get me to come out there and sit where he could easily fly to me and climb on me and sit with me.
I recently installed the Cornell Merlin Bird ID app and it's a handy little thing, so long as you're in North America. Today I finally got a name for the little stripey not-house sparrows; they're song sparrows, and they are cute little things.
I HELPED A TINY BIRB ON TUESDAY So even though it's a few weeks too early to be really legal, the council sent some guys to cut the 20ft leylandii hedge across our street back to some kind of civilized shape. I got woken up at about eight in the morning with these fuckers using chainsaws and their awful mulch-large-branches-into-tiny-chips machine - this was not a good, because still exhausted from weekend and ensuring cold. I closed all the windows to block out the worst of the noise - which by the way because of synaesthesia was basically rubbing low-grit sandpaper into my skin even muted - and tried to get on with my day. At about noon, I'm staring out the window wondering if I can get my sentence down to a self-defence plea if I grab a steak knife and start stabbing these fuckers to make them stop, when something drops out of the tree that they're currently mauling and skitters along the street into the much lesser cover of some ivy under our wall. My first thought is that it's a fallen leaf, but first of all, conifers, and second, there's no wind. I put some pants on and go out to look, and trying very hard to look like a part of the wall and not doing a great job, I find - Spoiler: he scream - this little dude. He was partially fledged, so I debated doing the usual thing and finding a tree that wasn't being mauled to stick him in out of reach of cats where his parents could find him, except that it was extremely loud out there and the possiblity of his folks not being scared off to the next county was pretty slim. Also, there's a lot of cats in our neighbourhood, and while he had forward propulsion down pretty well, he was pretty crap at the whole gaining lift thing - possibly cuz his tail was made of tiny baby stubfeathers not yet grown? Anyway, I knew that if one of our neighbour's tomcats caught him in the open, he was toast. I saw that cat take a bloody woodpigeon from midair once. This little guy wouldn't even touch the sides. That picture was taken in the first hour or so, where he alternated hissing, gaping and threatening to bite my ass if I so much as thought of coming near him. (I didn't even know finches COULD hiss, holy shit.) I suspect this panic mode may have been due to the apocalypse noises still coming from outside. I called the RSPCA, and they advised just keeping him warm and safe, not trying to feed him, and they would come and pick him up in the evening. Which means I had about six, maybe seven hours as a temporary bird-dad to look forward to. Once the tree-surgeons had gone, he started to calm down, and by calm down I mean to peep. It sounded a lot like a rusty wheel or a flapping door hinge, and it was about as regular. Spoiler: he squeak (Hour three - the grumpening.) By the time the RSPCA lady arrived, he had lost all fear of me, flutter-clambered out of his box, and was taking tiny falling-with-style practice flights all over me, my laptop, and my desk, all while squeaking like a rusty hinge and occasionally doing tiny 'help me!' shrieks if he slipped or missed his landing. Apparently little birbs like him don't learn to fear big things until they're old enough to know better. Spoiler: he fren (My noble and fierce companion) So yeah, on tuesday afternoon I played host to a golf-ball sized baby dinosaur who was smol but So Very Brave. It was definitely the highlight of my week.
Resurrecting this thread to say I got to feed a massive flock of very perch-on-your-arms-friendly city pigeons today! They were all very healthy, too, which makes me happy - I always feel sad when I see them missing toes or looking unkempt and sorry for themselves. I was in a different town visiting my moirail, and we had an hour before my coach home so she, knowing how much I love all animals of any kind, suggested we go down to the riverfront and feed the birds. A couple of Canada Geese were there, as well - they were a little bossy, but otherwise well behaved, and the bolder of the two even let me stroke her back while she fed. Next time I'm buying twice the cheap pound-store bird seed I fed them and just sitting down among them so I can get some good pictures :D
My mother owns a parrot! her name is ruby and she can talk a little, but doesn't like doing it if people she doesn't know come over. This is somewhat of a good thing, because things I've heard her say include "What the hell?", "kiss" and "NAKED WALK", as well as the usual wolf whistles any parrot seems to pick up, and the kissy noises. She currently likes to say the dog's name, "ball", "apple" "go for a walk" (and variations thereof) and "kiss". She can also do a perfect mimic of the smoke alarm. At accurate volume. (There were some issues earlier in the year involving spiders getting into the smoke alarm and somehow setting it off from in there.) As well as that, she can perfectly mimic the sound of our old washing machine's "need attention" beep (which it did whenever the lid unlocked itself and it needed to be opened and then closed), make Skype notification noises, badly mimic various phone sounds, and badly mimic the dishwasher and my alarm clock. She is currently sitting on my door, dozing, because something scared her in the lounge so I put her on my door (it was where she wanted to go). She usually goes on my door when Dad is mowing the lawn, because if Dad is mowing the lawn and Ruby is on her cage, Ruby will freak out and fly off and probably try to hide in the pantry, but if Ruby is on my door while Dad is mowing the lawn, she doesn't care at all. EDIT: She has, on at least one occasion, caused people my mother was ringing to think they were experiencing technical difficulties. "I'm sorry, we seem to be experiencing technical difficulties. Something's beeping." "Actually, that's us. We have a parrot."
birds are super rad! seagulls are my favorite, and there are lots of ring-billed gulls here when we have open water. not now, I guess. not a lot of birds around right now. we do have chickidees now though who are basically tiny balls of really excited fluff and I love them very much.
