Spoilers: shy cat is shy

By Andy Corbley -Jan 27, 2026

A study run by Michigan State University in the state’s upper peninsula has discovered that encouraging American kestrels to nest in cherry orchards also reduces the presence of food-borne illnesses that can be passed via the fruit to consumers.

By keeping rodents—but particularly small, fruit-eating birds out of the orchards, kestrels were found to be an effective means of pest control.

“Kestrels are not very expensive to bring into orchards, but they work pretty well,” said Olivia Smith, lead study author and assistant professor of horticulture at Michigan State University. “And people just like kestrels a lot, so I think it’s an attractive strategy.”

The hypothesis of Smith and her colleagues was that by keeping fruit-eating birds away, fewer avian pathogens would reach the shelves of the grocery store. This proved largely correct, as kestrel-guarded orchards showed an 81% decrease in instances of crop damage, including missing fruit and fruit with bite marks, and a 66% decrease in bird droppings on the fruit trees.

“I’ve noticed a difference having the kestrels around, hovering over the spring crops,” Brad Thatcher, a farmer based in Washington state who has housed kestrels in the fruit and vegetable areas on April Joy Farm for over 13 years, told Inside Climate News. “There’s very little fecal damage from small songbirds at that time of year versus the fall.”

There are no shortage of problems for cherry and fruit farmers these days, from wild weather swings to labor shortages. Perching birds are just one more issue to deal with, and they’re quite the issue, causing some $85 million in losses every year among major growing states like Michigan and California.

Growers attempt to prevent the fruit loss in a variety of ways, including chemical repellents, lethal shooting, trapping, hanging nets over their trees, visual and auditory scare tactics, and even deforesting the area surrounding the orchard.

Not only were the kestrels found to be more effective at keeping the birds away, but the detectable levels of Campylobacter, the most common foodborne pathogen spread by bird feces, were lower on branches in orchards with kestrel nest boxes (0.97% compared to around 10%).

Can supernatural/sci-fi critters being kosher? We have debated this since at least the second century CE (TL;DR usually yes, if they meet the other criteria, Leviathan lox, anyone?)

what about lab grown or synthetic meats? What about food that's not really anything? How would you do a schmita year with sci-fi fields?

If your community is tied to time and space in a physical sense that drives from Earth (or another planet, for that matter, if we're dealing w/aliens w/religions), how do you deal with that away from Earth? How do you know when holidays start? What direction do you pray? There are Jewish discussions about halacha in space already, many of which extend from older roots around geographic and weather extremes on planet earth. How do I know when rosh Hashanah starts on Mars? Is there a separate Martian one or do I use the earth date? Whose time zone??? Jewish astronauts rotating Earth have done holidays and Shabbat in space, but used a set time zone because sun rise isn't helpful if you're circling the earth several times a day.

Can sufficiently intelligent non-human convert? Does it matter if they are basically human, star trek style or can plant people convert? What if they communicate in a way that is fundamentally different from how a beit din ask questions? What if they can't touch the water in the mikvah?

how does religion work with sci-fi clothing? Do helmet designs interfere with kippt, space suits with tzitzit?

Where does a mezuzah go on a rocket?

What does a bar/bat/bnai mitzvah look like in this sci-fi setting?

On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!

The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV

Do we have Space Quakers? Space Mormons? Space Catholics? Space Anglicans? What does a "mission to the Martians" look like? How do repentant, formerly-colonial churches react to the opening of a whole new frontier, considering the knowledge they have of real-life colonialism? Are there "Christians against space colonialism" coalitions? Are there a bunch of weird new space evangelists and militant orders? Are there interspecies choirs? Interfaith dialogues with alien religions? What are military chaplains like in the Europan ice war (or whatever)?

and frankly, I have also seen this attitude in fantasy books! historical fantasy that just glosses right over the presence of real world religions or conflates older christian culture with modern christian culture. second world fantasy that alludes to fictional religious lore but actively refuses to engage with it! protagonists that inexplicably have a very modern american atheist attitude about religion in general.

why in fantasy are we refusing to explore the lore of the cultures by waving off the religions *created for the setting* and treating them as pointless and fake without even exploring anything about them? especially when the story has no trouble at all exploring things like magic, true prophecies, demons and spirits, and the literal existence of an afterlife. but it still won't do anything with the religious worldbuilding.

come on! there are so many ways to explore religion in scifi and fantasy, to make them an important part of the worldbuilding, real religions or fictional ones! I love it when authors explore religion in their scifi and fantasy.

Being supportive of trans people and involving us in research about our medical care legitimately has the ability to revolutionize our ability to study human biology, specifically in terms of hormones, cell biology, genetics, neuroscience, and nature vs. nurture - all of which are fields we are just only barely beginning to understand!!!

But nooooooo, that would be too easy and useful and potentially medically revolutionary

Not to mention, you know. Letting us revolutionize medical care for trans and nonbinary people in the process

"We have an incredibly shallow understanding of how hormones interact with the brain and body, in large part because it's so impossible to isolate them from every other possible factor"

GEE, SUCH A SHAME there aren't literally thousands of people would leap at the chance to help you start researching that-- oh, wait--

I feel a bit like that "Climate scientists remind world clean energy tech ready to go whenever" comic

"Trans people remind scientists about a ton of cool, revolutionary medical research ready to start literally whenever"

link: https://bsky.app/profile/brainvsbook.bsky.social/post/3llc72lyhu22j

google translate defaulting to chinese at first

okay but for those of us with interests in both the murderbot and the daomu biji fandoms this is kinda hilarious

(english-side-only really, i get that the kanji and hanzi are completely different)

I've only ever seen 弊 used to refer to one's company: 弊社, as the article says.

I've been told 弊 is used to refer to one's own something, and it has a very humble nuance.

So 弊機 translates to something like "I, your humble machine" or "I, who am but a mere machine".

Look inside

75% dropoff rate

Your study inherently selected for people willing to participate in this unpleasant experience, and then you didn't report on what the people who tapped out early had to say, either.

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.