becoming-intense, becoming-animal

the example given is the carolina chickadee. in the fall they form big flocks and need to be able to communicate efficiently with all those other birds, so their hearing is very fast. in the spring, the flock breaks up as individuals pair off to mate-- and the breeding season song is much simpler than the other year-round chickadee call! just four notes, and what makes it sexy to the girlies is how consistently the male can hit the exact perfect tone

in house sparrows, the females have seasonal hearing, but the males don't. so they hear the same in the fall, but in the spring the females get better at pitch and worse at speed. this is also interesting because speed of hearing improves your ability to locate an object in space based on sound, so when the hearing gets slower their ability to map sounds also gets blurrier.

Snoozing to the sounds of a serene river in Cherokee.

North Carolina

"Birds and Flowers" by Olia Fedorova. Hand embroidery, intervention into old embroideries, 2025.

Embroidery project that depicts birds and flowers that share the names with russian weapons, thus changing the associations Ukrainians have with them.