c/Superbowl
For all your owl related needs!
I'm a volunteer at a wild animal rescue. Squirrels have babies twice a year, and whichever ones end up displaced for one reason or another end up with us.
We're starting to wrap up for the year, but at the peak of both breeding seasons we have over 200 baby squirrels in our care, and depending how big they are, we need to take care of them 3 or 4 times a day.
They get fed, weighed, a good general inspection to look for any health problems, and their enclosures cleaned out. We give them hammocks and toys and things to build up their squirrel behaviors.
They'll eventually graduate to an outdoor enclosure with a lot more room to move around and/or we release them back to the environment where they resume their lives as nature intends.
As a larger and stronger than average person, squirrels are quite impressive little critters. They are extremely fast and agile, and you just can't appreciate it until you start to handle ones that aren't cooperative! They barely seem bound by the laws of physics. They can move any direction, in any orientation, stick tone everything with those tiny claws, have insane bursts of energy, and even ones with their eyes barely open have insane upper body strength to climb anywhere. When they are angry, they will hiss, spit, lunge and bite like the scariest of feral cats. They have sharp, reinforced teeth that can bite through our leather gloves if they really want to. They are no joke!
But they are also soft, loveable, and adorable critters that need a helping hand sometimes.
Here's a recent photo I grabbed while feeding one. You can make out those biceps and cannonball shoulders under the fur, and this one is on the small side, so it's a wimp compared to the big guys.
All us volunteers start our education on squirrels, as there are so many and they are pretty safe as far as wild animals go since they're small and typically not too aggressive.
I'm looking to get vaccinated for rabies next month so that next year I can work with the foxes and raccoons and the rest of the rabies prone species. My main ambition is raptors, but we don't get near as many of those as other animals, and they're all amazing in their own ways, so I just want to be able to work with all of them.
I think that's a good basic summary of everything. I'm far from an expert on any specific topic, but if you have any more questions, feel free to ask. It's a great job, and nearly anyone can do it if you have a few hours a week to do a shift (ours are 4 hours) and it's an indescribably positive experience for the most part. I recommend it to anyone who loves wild animals.
A lot of them are cool. But when they are dicks, they go all out. They intimidate me more than a lot of the larger animals.
Squirrels are not typically considered a vector for rabies. They can have surprisingly bad attitudes and can do some damage to you though.
Source: I handled over 200 squirrels this month. 🐿️
Glad you liked it! I'm always up for encouraging you all to learn about your animal neighbors.
This one focuses on Fawn.
This one is about Freeze in humans and animals. Skip the abstract and the rest isn't too bad to read. This one is a lot more technical but has good charts.
After that, if you want more, just searching "fight flight freeze" will give you a ton. The "fawn" gets called a few different things so leaving it off might get you more results and you can add "human" or "animal" if you want specific things for those categories.
I hadn't seen fawn on there before either. I looked up fight/flight/freeze and saw I was out of date myself. 😔
Now we know!
I volunteer with wild animals, so I purposely do a lot of things animals may or may not like that most people won't normally do.
Very few animals will want to hurt you. Animals will do very little they don't have to do. This comes down to 2 main things: calories are precious, and there is no medical care. If you aren't food or pose a potential threat, they want nothing to do with you. Wasting calories and getting injuries makes it harder to get a next meal.
The classic fight/flight response has evolved into something more along the lines of fight/flight/freeze/fawn. Animals aren't dumb, and in almost every way their muscles and abilities are better than yours, so there are multiple options they have, and they will pick what they think is best.
They also have unique personalities, and won't all react the same. I have more scary squirrels at work than I do raptors.
It is also common to have small songbirds drive off hawks or owls, and the raptors just move on instead of fighting because the energy required and the potential for injury to fight isn't worth it. If you're messing with a nest, they may go after you, they may not.
Animals get dangerous when you take away some of their options, like the classic cornered animal. If you take away the option to flee, why wouldn't they think you're there to hurt them, and they will hurt you to protect themselves. Most will make noise to scare you so you go away or back off and give them an opening. If you get your hands on them and you are calm, they will often wait to see what you're going to do.
Learning how animals react to things and seeing how unique their personalities/risk tolerances are is one of my favorite parts of working with them. People act like animals are generic NPCs, but they've got unique minds that are the results of their collected experiences, just like ours.
Yeah, I know there's been a lot of told-ya-sos, but he tricked enough of us. I'm still glad he's there rather than Oz, but I hate all these shit people running such a good chunk of the state. PA is pretty cool, and even a lot of the MAGAs I know aren't usually the worst people, I just hate when they get the power to back up their dumbass talk. I just think we deserve better as a state. But I guess pretty much every state is in a similar mess right now...
We should really get do-overs on our votes when people misrepresent how they are going to vote. The Fetterman I'm getting is quite the opposite of the one I was sold...
On the upside, the CR is dead for now, no thanks to Fetterman.
The Republican-controlled Senate has failed to pass a short-term funding bill that would prevent a government shutdown at the end of the month.
Earlier, continuing resolution (CR) cleared the House, but ultimately stalled in the upper chamber – unable to reach the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster.
Democrats remain resolute that they will continue to block any bill if it doesn’t include significant amendments to health care provisions. Today, senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, was the lone Democrat to vote for the GOP-drawn CR. While Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, joined their colleagues across the aisle and voted no.
It's a $6.2 billion merger between Nexstar and TEGNA that is at stake.
Nexstar already has an almost 40% reach across the US. They've been sucking up to Trump this year because they want to merge with TEGNA, which would give them access to 80% of the country. To do this though, regulations need to be dropped to allow them to exceed limits that have been in place for decades to prevent this level of media control. This is the quid-pro-quo for them, as Colbert was for the Paramount merger.
(Source)
As Deadline’s Dade Hayes reported, the merger “challenges decade-old limits on control of local media” as the new company would control 265 local TV stations across 44 states and the District of Columbia, representing about 80 percent of American households. This would far exceed the current limit of 39 percent, which has been in place for the past three decades through both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Making his intentions crystal clear shortly after Trump’s 2024 electoral victory that he sought an end to the broadcast station ownership cap, Sook declared in November that he hoped GOP control of government would help usher in an expansion of his company.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Heinlein
The Mote in God's Eye - Niven / Pournelle
Solaris - Lem
Fire Upon the Deep - Vinge
Flowers for Algernon - Keyes
Diamond Age - Stephenson
Startide Rising - Brin
The Demolished Man - Bester
Have Space Suit - Will travel - Heinlein
Out of the Silent Planet - CS Lewis
Uplift War - Brin
I do ocassionally venture out to the other communities! 🦉
I felt bad for skimming it, but even on my laptop it was a big block o' facts. I mainly just felt like chiming on in the koala vaccine since I hadn't noticed anyone mention it so far.
They just developed a vaccine for koala chlamydia!
Doesn't fix the other issues, but it's something.
PS. Needs paragraphs!
Getting involved in activities has really helped me see there are a ton of folks out there still doing amazing and positive things.
I've started playing music with other people again and we've played 2 small public shows and some events where we just play for each other and everyone has been very supportive and we have a great time.
I also volunteered at the wild animal rescue this year, and it's hard to choose if the people or animals are more amazing. Well, the people are much friendlier than the animals, but seeing the things they can come back from really can feel like witnessing miracles sometimes.
But that's twice a week I get to hang out with people that help me grows, support me being a better and more rounded person, and we forget about outside troubles and put everything into a positive activity together. It's been a major help this year.
As someone who doesn't like being in the spotlight, switching from guitar to bass was very liberating
I've been learning piano the last 3 years, and now I'm either solo or at least more front and center and dealing with that has been as challenging as learning the instrument.
Still playing with others I feel is the most fun thing about any instrument. I think I learn more and learn faster doing it as a group, and it's just a lot of fun making music with people.
SSA is just part of the package. DOGE's "services" are in exchange for special privileges for Elon's companies. Removing regulations, worker protections, limits on what can go on in his company town, oversight for whatever nonsense Boring Company gets up to, and so on.
Exactly. They made it very clear that these were just things they felt were obstacles slowing them down from doing as they pleased.
For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.
The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.
They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.
They did none of these things.
I have a real hard time believing there are any good people in DOGE.
The people they talk to in this article, and the people NPR have interviewed all like to talk like they were there to bring in sweeping good changes.
But when everything before these people signed up for these jobs was so public, about Musk and Trump and their highly visible opinions of these agencies and how they felt about them, how any reasonable person could think this is the type of change that would be implemented is beyond me.
They all come off as people with no capability to read the room or to understand they're being used by evil people. They might be good IT people or programmers, but if accounting knowledge or any experience with an agency or what it does isn't a requirement or even a consideration when you are coming in as a "reformer," that should raise red flags.
I don't trust any of these people, and I no longer have faith in any of the data they hold or share being secure. I think everyone should get a new SSN if/when sanity returns to the agency. There is no way this important information was held securely with people this sloppy and of poor judgement in charge of it.
It's all good. Last week there were a lot in a bad mood since they were being weened. Their free ride is coming to an end. 😁