I adore my jays. I switched feeding strategies in my backyard to a trough-style feeder to make extra room for the little birds and prevent the Jays from bullying everyone else out.
One cool thing I’ve noticed is the Jays acting like a (very loud) lookout alarm for all the other species. The Jays scream, and everyone runs away and hides. I’ve seen it when the hawk comes poking around, and once when a cat found its way onto my deck.
Hell yeah, little Jay, get it!
They’re such ugly little vultures under all that floof, I love it
So mean!!
I’ve never seen this in real life, but I have seen like half a dozen sparrows chasing around a hawk that was stalking one of their nests. It was interesting to see the cooperation. “Not today, Satan!”
I don’t know where OP is, but here in Massachusetts, we have no sales tax on groceries:
https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/massachusetts/sales-tax-exemptions
Hahaha, thank you I needed that laugh
I can feel the sneeze being restrained here
Oh great, now I’m over here googling pictures of various owl feet 😂
Given what I’ve seen, I’m also gonna go with my neighborhood buddy, GHO
What an adorable perfect family 🥰
Yep! Over a billion years old and a major feature on Pangaea.
I knew it was West Virginia.
This is not climate change, y’all. The Appalachians are an eroding mountain range. The town where my sister lives is in a constant battle to keep the roads from falling into the adjacent creek beds. It’s just an absurdly difficult geography to build on.
Nice! Thank you
Ooooh, must be someone from an instance I don’t federate with because I don’t see another comment on this thread. Lemmy is weird
Aww, owl kissy faces 💕
And turns out they mate for life, so that’s an owl married couple.
“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
Creepy freakazoid under cute floofy camouflage? Yep, that checks out