Chetzemoka

"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:

https://pg.allaboutbirds.org/

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 [email protected] community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @[email protected] makes the most amazing educational posts. It's a lot of fun.

Why is it always in CT??? That's an incredible save, if the first round of compressions weren't really effective. I can't even imagine doing compressions for 11 minutes at all, let alone in isolation gear. I think I'd join the patient, if I tried that.

I was really readying a polite, "No you should definitely render aid first and ask questions later" lecture until your comment made me read that again...slowly.

That setup was subtle and very well done. Bravo @[email protected]

It was fun, a nice thing to look forward to the past couple of days. This was a lot of work for you! I hope it was worth it for you to try something new and innovative, even if it might seem it didn't draw as much attention from those outside the community as Owl of the Year did. I know we appreciate all the effort you put in here.

I think the biggest thing I'm taking away from this between the Pharaoh, the Galapagos SEO, and from previous posts, the Jamaican, is that I had no idea owls are so widespread and so diverse. I never would have figured an owl could live in desert conditions, but there the Pharaoh is.

From a person with a lot of years of experience fighting mold on wood in a humid climate, what you want is borax:

https://www.thisoldhouse.com/green-home/21331232/killing-mold-on-wood

Borax kills mold and also soaks into wood and stays there to prevent future growth. Bleach does not help on porous surfaces like wood:

"Note that bleach should not be used to kill mold found on wood. While bleach is very effective for killing mold on non-porous surfaces, it doesn’t work well when it comes to wood. This is because the chlorine in bleach can’t penetrate wood, so only the water portion of the bleach gets absorbed.

The mold may appear to be removed from the surface, but it’ll likely continue to grow underneath and return within a few months."

I was excited to learn there's an owl species in the Galapagos! It just seems like such a remote place in my mind. Still has owls ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'll love Flammy forever, but I think the Buff Fronted has really won me over. It's just such a striking bird.

Thanks for the recommend. I'll give it a shot, honestly.