Earth

"Quack"

$45k for the flower beds in our parks, another $45k for the plants in the road medians. None of them are pollinator plants and a fair number are tropical/temperate species we're planting in the high desert. Those median plants generate 9500kg of green waste per year which we don't have the facilities to compost. The teams required to service them probably cost $200/hr~. They require almost daily hand-watering using a heavy truck in a drought-stressed region. We can't even propagate them because the cultivars are all patented. All so the public can look at some stupid purely ornamental bed and say "wowoo petunias" for three months.

Also our budget is being cut by 20%+ next year and half the workers don't get benefits.

My hate is becoming pure enough to write theory.

It's a snowy owl.

Wild orcas on more than 30 occasions in four oceans have attempted to share their prey with people, potentially to develop relationships with humans, researchers have found.

In each of the instances recorded over two decades, orcas approached a person within a length of the orca’s body, and dropped freshly-hunted prey in front of the human, then waited for a response, according to a paper reporting the behavior published Monday in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Orcas of every age tried to share their prey, and just about everything was on the menu: sea otter, harbor seal, common murre, gray whale, green turtle, eagle ray, starfish, jellyfish, on and on.

Orcas are the ocean’s top predator, and their brains are second only to modern humans in terms of their size in relation to their body. Their capacity for advanced communications and cognitive, social and emotional intelligence is well known. Prey sharing is common in orca culture.

So just what are the orcas doing, offering food to people?

Full Article Archive

Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1934-35 by unit 886. Part of the New Deal, the men and women who made this worked over 40 hours a week, and took home $30 a month. Most of them apparently sent it back home as this was all on the tail end of the Great Depression.

It's pretty neat. The place is built from 'caliche-crete', which was a blend of concrete and the local caliche stone.

Pretty interesting, thinking about the people who built this, looking at the individual blocks and thinking about the toil in the hot Texas sun to build this place.

Out at a place built by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in 1935/36. Found this while walking around. I think this was used for surveying changes to the land around where I am, as this area was dammed in the 1930s.

I've been searching for something specific to these but I think due to their age it might be lost to time.

We are setting out to rewild an Icelandic wetland in a complex project involving, birds, freshwater habitats and large areas of degraded peatland!

Closeup look at a Helmet-head Gecko (Tarentola chazaliae), encountered on a coastal highway at night in central Morocco. About 4 inches (10cm) in length, these are nocturnal lizards that prey on small insects, esp. ants (much like horned lizards).

https://bsky.app/profile/somuchpingle.bsky.social/post/3lsads6gaxs2k

This reflecting pool has a duck ramp. for the ducks. very thoughtful. very accessible.

https://bsky.app/profile/namioshiro.bsky.social/post/3ls56g4eb2s2c

There's a gottdang cheeto in the wattle house:/

I found this poor goose laying in a park today and acting odd. When I got closer I saw that its left leg was coiled up and the area around it was covered in blood. As far as I can tell, the goose got trapped in some fishing line or something and nearly amputated its leg. None of the wildlife rescue groups could get it so a coworker and I done wrassled it into a critter gitter and brought it to a rescue. With any luck it will make some kind of recovery even if it can't be released.