And the National Parks Services said, “lol, no” and went rogue and we were all like, “I was not expecting the park rangers to lead the resistance, none of the dystopian novels I read prepared me for this but cool.”
Best tumblr post by a friend of mine in years.
this is gonna get long and wordy, because i kind of have a lot of FEELINGS wrt the nps.
i grew up surrounded by nps employees, because after earning his masters in forestry, my dad spent his entire professional career working for the nps.
you do not join the nps to make a lot of money. you do not join the nps if you want easy career advancement. especially if both you and your spouse/partner want to work outside the home. or if you and your spouse/partner both work for the nps. because the unofficial motto of the nps is “to move up, you have to move on.” it’s like the army, but for liberal, tree hugging hippie types. and they don’t usually just transfer you – you have to apply for positions you want.
my dad wanted to advance, so we moved every 2-3 years when i was growing up. as his first nps mentor told him, “this job is hard on families.”
so you have a bunch of people who have built a career in which they could be earning much more with their qualifications in the private sector and for which they are literally willing to uproot themselves every few years and move.
might be across the country. might be from urban to rural, or vice a versa. if you start out as a temp/seasonal employee, which is usually how you get your foot in the door, you usually have to make a “sacrifice move” – i.e. apply to a position in a park that you know will be under-applied for, because nobody wants to go there. we lived in corpus cristi, tx for 18 months as a result of this. before that, we had lived inside of mt. rainier national park. it was like moving to an entirely different country.
maybe your spouse gets tired of moving every few years. maybe they get tired of their own career having to be on the back burner, or sacrificed completely, so you can move on to the next advancement, at the next park.
maybe they don’t want to live in a remote area, or an urban area. maybe your kids are tired of leaving their friends and their schools at short notice.
why the hell would anyone willingly choose this career, when they know what kinds of financial hardships it will bring? when they know how hard it will be on their families and their interpersonal relationships? on themselves?
most of them do it because they genuinely, passionately believe in preservation. because they believe in the mission of the nps: “
The National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.”
and motherfuckers, you had best believe they are relying on ~*~actual science~*~ to carry out that mission.
they have been fighting the good fight for decades in a myriad of ways, both local and national. i have watched my dad prepare for local city council meetings, in which he had to tell a group of enraged and concerned townspeople that, no, they could not MOVE THE RIVER BACK after it changed course following spring floods, to flow through an older channel. didn’t matter that your pappy and your grandpappy had always been able to see if from a certain bend in the road, and now you can’t. nature is taking its course, literally, and the nps is not gonna intervene in that, no matter how much you fuss.
i have watched him celebrate small victories, like the time he wrote a funding proposal for a national project that was so fucking convincing he got $2million more than he asked for – under the fucking gwb administration.
and, like, do not get me wrong, i have had me some issues with my dad over the years. i was not always super psyched to lose friends and have to make new ones every time we moved, or about the damage to my mother’s career some of these moves caused. not to mention their eventual divorce.
but i have never doubted, not for one fucking second, that my dad did what he did in his career because he genuinely believed he could make a difference. because he genuinely believed in the preservation of our natural resources for his children, and his children’s children, and everyone fucking else in this country. because he believed in protecting our environment and our history from those who would destroy it for their own short term financial gain.
the nps is made up of thousands of employees like him.
they have been relying on science to protect the resources under their administration for a long time.
they have been resisting those who would have them ignore scientific evidence for a long time.
you’re goddamned right they’re gonna resist this bullshit that’s going on now.
Here’s a quick intro to an amazing capture right before I released him! Starring me and a young red-headed woodpecker, who wants nothing more than to destroy my hand and go back to acorns.
(Both of his wishes came true, as a matter of fact. An hour later I came back to see him on his larder, faithful as always).
the tags on my woodpecker posts make me so happy you guys are great and I am glad the world understands that birds are just very mad most of the time
National Geographic has described him as “the father of wildlife photography” for his early use of camera traps and flash photography.
In 1935, Shiras published Hunting Wild Life with Camera and Flashlight: a Record of Sixty Five years’ Visits to the Woods and Waters of North America, a two-volume set of over 960 of his wildlife photographs including some of the earliest ‘flash’ photography.
Moray eels have been bred for the first time at a Zoo in Austria, and the babies are now old enough to show off their very impressive teeth. “Up to now, nobody knew what the larvae look like, what they eat and how they behave“, said the zoo’s director, Dagmar Schratter, who hopes to breed more moray eels now that they’ve finally figured out the right conditions.
Scientists taught 23 riding horses of various breeds to look at a display board with three icons, representing wearing or not wearing a blanket. Horses could choose between a “no change” symbol or symbols for “blanket on” or “blanket off.” Previously, their owners made this decision for them. Horses are adept at learning and following signals people give them, and it took these equines an average of 10 days to learn to approach and touch the board and to understand the meaning of the symbols. All 23 horses learned the entire task within 14 days. They were then tested in various weather conditions to see whether they could use the board to tell their trainers about their blanket preferences. The scientists report online in Applied Animal Behaviour Science that the horses did not touch the symbols randomly, but made their choices based on the weather. If it was wet, cold, and windy, they touched the “blanket on” icon; horses that were already wearing a blanket nosed the “no change” image. But when the weather was sunny, the animals touched the “blanket off” symbol; those that weren’t blanketed pressed the “no change” icon. The study’s strong results show that the horses understood the consequences of their choices, say the scientists, who hope that other researchers will use their method to ask horses more questions.
i love everything about this but especially the last sentence
2/2 so I was wondering if large birds just hate human
transportation or something haha. Thanks for your post, very
interesting.
(In reference to a comment I made about kayaks being incredibly rude in Swan Culture)
I’ve been looking at my inbox like “I am not some kind of ECCENTRIC BIRD WHISPERER,” but I actually know the answer to this one, and it’s hilarious.
Large birds don’t have a particular hateboner for human transportation, but wild turkeys have two unique properties that make them behave ridiculously when they collide with human populations. For those who aren’t familiar with them, wild turkeys are large, boisterous birds that tend to interact with humans most frequently around the autumn which is convenient for Thanksgiving and mating season in early spring. Most of the time, they live peaceable lives in the woods, but around November they run around in flocks bothering innocent citizens and picking fights with vending machines, and then they usually go away again.
The toms, or dominant males, can stand up to 4 feet tall and weigh up to 24 pounds. They’re the ones that do the fancy displays:
The First Unique Turkey Property: Now, wild turkeys are a little bit like betta fish, in that they perceive any shiny/reflective surface that shows them a reflection as actually containing Another Turkey, and they react accordingly. When they react to the Other Turkey – usually by posturing aggressively and flaring their fins feathers majestically – the Other Turkey ESCALATES THE SITUATION by posturing as well. At some point the real turkey loses its temper and attacks, pecking and scratching and trying to take the fucker apart, only to find that the Other Turkey has protected itself with some kind of force field.
So to a wild turkey that has encountered enough autumnal car-related psychic battles, the completely logical conclusion to take away from them is that cars contain demonic spiritsthat must be subdued. Other examples of things that wild turkeys are compelled to vanquish include… well, other reflective things.
To address this, cover reflective things (you can rub soap on your car to make it less reflective) and frighten off the turkey if it’s keeping you from leaving your car.
The Second Unique Turkey Property: This is a little bit embarrassing for all concerned, but you have to think about it like a turkey would. You see, humans are oddly compelling creatures to a hormonal turkey. We have bare faces with interestingly positioned lumps of flesh, we gobble our speech in a way that almost sounds like Turkey, we strut about on two feet showing off our long sexy legs, we strut about in family groups, we often have access to really good food, our clothing is big and bright and colorful. Turkey faces change color with their mood; human faces are all kinds of fascinating colors, plus additional fantastic decorations. To wild turkeys, humans are a type of turkey, and further: many humans are either Intimidating Sexual Threats, or Exciting Sexual Beings.
Now, I am very sorry about this, but not only can wild turkeys be kind of reverse furries, they also have unexpected ideas about gender and sexuality. So to some female turkeys, “male” humans are excitingly sexy and they will follow one around for embarrassingly long periods of time, cooing attractively – meanwhile, the tom turkey and the subordinate males will be OUTRAGED by the COMPETITION presented by the interloper, and will attempt to subdue “him.” And “female” humans are likewise at risk of being passionately seduced by the dominant toms, or quietly propositioned by subordinate males – or the females may attempt to recruit you into their existing social system – as a junior member, of course. They have a strict pecking order.
Unfortunately for humans, your preferred gender may not necessarily actually
translate to the gender that turkeys decide you are. And some turkeys
may decide you’re “male” while others will decide that you’re “female,” so that will be confusing, and some dominant female turkeys have “male” sexual traits – like beards and tail fans – anyway. They recognize and remember humans, so if you had a particularly exciting encounter with a specific turkey, it will probably remember you.
Also unfortunately for humans, the fine distinctions between Turkey Seduction, Turkey Competition, and Turkey Networking are usually a little bit lost, and all of this behavior seems to be the same thing – it mostly consists of a large dinosaur-like bird trotting at you, possibly screaming and pecking and flapping, and can be worrying. If you are in the car and the turkey can see you, and it wishes to
continue a previous encounter, it may well insist upon this in a
frightening way.
Turkeys don’t give a shit about human “gender” and “authority,” as the many available videos on the internet of turkeys attacking police officers, reporters and mailmen will assure you. They just make logical decisions that are perfectly natural and reasonable to turkeys, and humans react by running away.
So what do you do about this? Well, DO NOT RUN AWAY, this means you that you are a Submissive Turkey and their behavior will escalate. Turkeys can learn the meaning of “no,” and you don’t have to be bullied by them.
And the Massachusetts Fish and Game website has a huge resource explaining all the subtleties of wild turkey behavior and how to combat the nuisances. Essentially, you must not attempt to make friends with them or attract them; once they arrive, you must “be bold” and establish Dominance, and encourage everyone to do the same.
If the turkeys are aggressive around children and the elderly, all sources agree that if they become a danger, you can contact the relevant authorities and have the turkeys removed or destroyed.
Anyway, that’s why turkeys attack cars. The take-home message is: the cars are too shiny and you are possibly a sexy turkey.
I don’t know what you want to make of that
A wild ride from start to finish. XD
The take-home message is: the cars are too shiny and you are possibly a sexy turkey.
honestly if you’re creating a sci-fi anything and you need alien inspiration just google some fungi or parasitic insects or deep sea anything.
there may be stranger things in this galaxy than cedar-apple rust, but not MANY stranger things, imo
someone just reblogged this and reminded me of it so I am here to remind YOU ALL that cedar-apple rust exists and is the weirdest shit
look at that fucker! it spends its life cycle alternating between eastern red cedar and apple trees, which would be cool all by itself but THEN it has to go and be all tentacle-y and bright orange and slimy and also bigger than my hand. gosh.
A Pretty Taste for Paradox 
