Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
This is Becky the Speckled Sussex. I do not think most chickens like to be held like babies, but Kevin had to flip her over the other day to trim her toenails—you don’t generally have to trim chicken nails, but she’s seven years old and has bad feet—and she was like “Yes, I approve of this, human. In the future, you will cuddle me this way until I allow you to stop.”
She also demands that her treats be offered to her in a human’s palm. Becky does not choose to scuffle on the ground like a peasant! Becky requires treats be brought to her as befits her station!
The roosters all think she is the sexiest thing on two legs and for awhile there she couldn’t leave the coop without inciting a riot. She had to go stay with the bantams until they settled down. (The bantam roosters view her much like Everest, and while they will occasionally try to scale those heights, it’s not something they want to do every day.)
A new study has surprising insights into how spending time outside affects our wellbeing—and which parts of nature may be more therapeutic than others.
Do you see a bird right now? Can you hear one chirping? If so, you might be getting a mental health boost.
A study recently published in the journal Science found that being in the presence of birds made people feel more positive.
For two weeks, study participants using a smartphone app were prompted to fill out a questionnaire three times a day. They were asked questions about their surrounding environment and their mental state. Emerging from the app’s data was a discernible trend—study participants who saw birds were more likely to report a better mood.
Research is increasingly finding that getting outside is good for our brains, which is why scientists want to know more about what aspects of nature may be the most therapeutic.
“This kind of study helps us understand how people’s everyday experience with specific elements of nature, such as birds, can be restorative,” says Lisa Nisbet, a psychologist at Trent University in Canada, who was not involved with this research.
Scientists have two main theories for why nature may be a soothing balm for our overworked minds. The first is that because homo sapiens evolved in nature, urban environments create a constant background stress.
“And we can recover from that stress in natural settings because that’s what we evolved for,” James says of the theory. “We as human beings like nature because that’s where we’re meant to be.”
The second theory is called attention restoration theory. Similar to the first, it theorizes that the constant strain of daily life—stressful commutes and constant Zoom calls—requires intense focus. Nature allows us to disengage that focus and engage in a sort of open-eyed meditation as we watch a bird flying from branch to branch.
here is a concept: time travel cop, fish & wildlife division
most of their job is dealing with the kinds of assholes who think black market tiger cubs are a great idea right up until someone gets mauled, except these are even bigger assholes with black market Smilodon cubs that they are even less equipped to care for
this is the most straightforward and therefore relatively headache-free part of their job, because it’s the same “put that thing back where it came from or so help me” song and dance every time
it’s also significantly less depressing than the trophy hunters who don’t even want an alive extinct animal. those are extra annoying because you have to undo the time travel that let them kill that poor Megatherium or thylacine or anklyosaur or whatever, and it’s always so much extra paperwork.
and those people suck, definitely, and have fully earned a stint in Time Jail. no question. but they still do not create anywhere near as much work as the obsessive hobbyists with their exhaustively careful best practices and worryingly good track-covering. also, weirdly, it’s almost always birds with them?
like. the guys who will flagrantly abuse Time Law to bird-nap breeding pairs just long enough to raise one clutch of eggs apiece, and return them seamlessly to their spots on the timeline. who are so determined to keep their pet (ha) projects going that no one even realizes what they’re doing until they have an entire stable breeding population of passenger pigeons up and running. who are now the reason that reps from six different zoos are about to start throwing hands right in front of you over who gets dibs.
those guys cause the most paperwork. and half the time they’re snapped up by the same zoo or wildlife preserve that gets their colony of ivory-billed woodpeckers or Carolina parakeets or — once, very memorably — giant fucking South Island moa, and they never even spend a day in Time Jail.
Ooh! There have been a few “surprise, not extinct!” events recently, again weirdly almost always birds, though occasionally fish. What if they really did go extinct, but someone from 2459 went back to 1900, built up a minimum breeding population in 2459, and then released them into the wild in 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015? Releasing new groups every five years in our century would avoid a sudden suspicious population surge and no one would think to look for the culprit in their own century because Jerdon’s Babbler (real-world example, rediscovered in 2014) has always been there/then.
You could build a novel around the relationship between the time cop and the rogue bird lover. The time cop caught the bird lover over the passenger pigeons. They went to time jail for 10 years outside the timeline, and then were hired to manage the passenger pigeons by an accredited zoo’s. The time cop suspects they’re still up to something, but other than the passenger pigeons, all they appear to be doing is raising research colonies of perfectly ordinary birds. Except all the species they’re working with were believed to be extinct at one point….
One thing real world zoos do now is…well…something like elven changelings if you think about it. They time the mating of a captive breeding pair to that of an isolated wild breeding pair in places where inbreeding is a serious risk. Then they swap a captive-born offspring for a wild-born–each breeding pair unknowingly raising a foster. Both zoos and the wild population get improved genetic diversity, without the risk inherent in “rewilding” a zoo-born adult. Doing that with birds and time travel would be even easier–grab an egg, take it to the future, raise and breed it, take an egg back to the original nest. The original parents raise their grandchild, not their child.
The hardest part for me would be explaining why the time cop thought this was wrong!
oh I love all of this. i think the time cop would eventually just be like “PLEASE get a license from an accredited zoo already so i can stop having to deal with you” but the accredited zoos aren’t on board with the “release into the wild 200 years ago” part of the scheme
and also our rogue bird enthusiast has a white whale and that white whale is Haast’s eagle
That felt too mild so may i present AAAAAA bird v2
saved as →
These are cute but misleading, because the call doesn’t go on–it’s more like one single, quick, rusty beep, only that beep is one of the loudest sounds made by any land animal
oh i’m so glad you have a video of ‘em, I knew I had seen one before!
I have provided an updated funnypic to more accurately reflect the reality of the bird.
this is for all the people who enjoy simply looking at pigeons doing their thing
so when I was about 12, I decided I was sufficiently suburban and alienated that I didn’t have any proper superstitions and so therefore I would pick one for myself. now one white bird in a flock of feral pigeons is good luck for me, specifically, because I say so. hello, my own personal lucky bird
also pigeons are just fantastic. look at them. can you execute a vertical takeoff and a midair 90 degree turn to evade an oncoming Deliveroo biker? no you can’t. they have adapted ‘live on cliff and avoid world’s fastest falcon’ to ‘live on windowledge and avoid the number 41 bus’ and I love them.
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