Bug = payed actor

via @ninjahijabimuse​

All of it, pretty much

The moms are doing a LOT, constantly, even when it doesn't look like it. They keep in perpetual motion looking for bugs and food for the babies (who are bottomless pits), who for the first couple weeks almost exclusively eat only what mom says is okay, until they start to recognize the stuff she gives them. Unlike pigeons and other birds that leave the babies in the nest and go hork down as much as they can, or songbirds that grab insects and come back to stationary kids, peahens travel with their kids, and must avoid stepping on them, find food, AND watch for predators (and be willing to kick ass at any moment if predators do come by). They are also listening for when the babies complain about being cold; they don't sit down at the first complaint, because babies are always a little cold and cranky about not being able to lounge about in the heat with a full belly. So they have to judge at what point they NEED to stop looking for food and sit so the babies can warm up and nap under them.

Getting new moms (not "first time" new but "these babies have just hatched" new) to eat, themselves, is a challenge, because they try to give pretty much everything they find to the babies. It's part of why you can see the big bowl of wet feed- there has to be excess to the point where the babies can all be shown it's food, and still have plenty for mom to eat after showing them, while they take a few bites by themselves. So they're doing all this while tired and hungry and a bit weakened from sitting on eggs for a month instead of eating and drinking and moving around normally.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

it would be so awesome

They wear suits, but they don't even know basic etiquette.

Huh. A generational divide.

Like, I don't actually mind watching videos if I know what the video is about and I want to watch it and I have the time to do so. If a friend sends me a video and describes it, I can then watch the video if it appeals to me.

But I have a hard time processing audio and visual at the same time. It's why I watch EVERYTHING with subtitles, because it's the only way I'll be able to understand everything. And a LOT, dare I say MOST, videos people make either don't have captions, or the captions are "auto" added by some kind of algorithm, and aren't correct. I'm 100% guilty of this! But most of my videos are cute animal videos that don't have audio words that matter. It's different when it's, like, an instructional video that is trying to explain something, and I need to know what's going on and the only way to do that is to watch/listen at the same time.

I also don't have a huge amount of spare time that I'm not doing or supposed to be doing or about to be doing something else in. I don't scroll algorithmic content out of boredom. I don't trawl the internet for videos. I follow like 30 accounts on tumblr, and at least a third of them are secondary accounts for the others, and some of them literally post maybe once a month, some less. That's all I have time for keeping track of. Most of the 'stuff I'm doing online' is research or learning, and I want to be able to skim to see what's there, to know if it is going to be worth my time to slow down and carefully read. With how search results are these days, half the links I click are garbage and a quick scan of the page can mean a huge difference in wasted time. I can't quick scan a video to find out if I'm about to waste the next 10 minutes of my life watching it through or not, I just have to waste the time and be mad about it after. And instead of doing that, I will simply not watch the video.

With videos, sure there are some things that are better or only able to be shown properly on video (a good example, I think, would be something like learning sign language... actually seeing someone do the motions is way easier than reading text describing hand motions. I've done instructional videos on how to ear tag mice and how to gavage feed peafowl and how to clip a chicken's beak, where describing the motions may not necessarily make sense.... but in those cases having a text description AND the video is still best). But if it's something that doesn't NEED to be a video-only thing, but someone made it a video, and I don't understand something, then I'm stuck rewinding over and over again, trying to get to the right spot. And "rewind" functions on internet videos are atrocious, if you've ever tried to use them there's no precision to it. So if (WHEN) I rewind a few seconds too far back, my brain immediately goes "whoops too far we know this part skip it" and half the time only tunes back to focus after what I needed to hear already passed. Which means i miss it. Again. And again. and again. And then I get frustrated at having to deal with a video. If it was just fucking WORDS on the PAGE, I could re-read it until I get it.

And that kind of experience isn't necessarily generational. It's probably /correlated/ because folks my age and older didn't grow up with endless video feeds from around the world. Instructions were printed where we could read them so that's how our brains got wired to absorb info. But someone with audio processing issues like me, or that is deaf/HoH, isn't necessarily old. Someone that is blind or has tracking issues or attention issues or can't read or whatever that makes watching videos easier for them isn't necessarily young. And people with just general preferences can fall into any generation.