My life is average.

EMERGENCY RENT/MOVING COMMISSIONS!

Do you want a Poster for a moment, session, or campaign in your D&D, Monster of the Week, or Pathfinder game? Message me to commission a poster! I need to raise money fast for moving soon.

Pls enjoy, in order of appearance, The Sundance Kid, Ripley, and Nimbus.

Bonus Close-up:

If you want to build rock towers, get your own rocks and build them at home. That’s perfectly fine. But rocks provide vital habitat for wildlife, especially in stream bed; moving and stacking them leaves them without shelter, crushes them, exposes their eggs, and leads to soil erosion and bank destruction. Leave them where they are.

This is a Hellbender salamander. Hellbenders are the third largest aquatic amphibian in the world, and the largest amphibian in the US. They are extremely endangered, in huge part because people are moving rocks in what little habitat they have left to them. These big boys can live for decades and once they choose a rock to live under, that’s it, that’s where they live, and they do not do well relocating. Studies have found that if their rock is moved or even disturbed, the hellbender will not return to it- even if you can replace the rock how you think you found it. Moving rocks, even just briefly, runs the risk of crushing them, their young, their eggs, or depleting the places where their food sources hide (they eat mostly crawfish and small fish that hide among rocks), either from you moving the rock or from other rocks falling in the absence of the rock you moved. Even if it doesn’t immediately kill them, it can permanently displace and ultimately cause the death of one.

These are not the only creatures that suffer from habitat being destroyed, they are just one I happen to know the face, name, and situation of. Please, please, please. It’s not worth the photo. It’s just not. Leave nature in place where it belongs, leave no trace. Protect those that have no defense against you other than your choice to be kind to them.

Fossil reindeer. La terre avant le déluge. 1874.

This federally endangered beetle hasn’t had a reproducing population in Ohio since 1974. For the last ten years, conservationists from the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium have released captive-reared beetles, but have been unable to find any surviving offspring after the released adults finish their short lifespan.

This last year conservationists released 472 captive-reared beetles from large, more cold-hardy stock and finally found new, overwintered beetles. Another participating institution, the Cincinnati Zoo, also found overwintered beetles for the first time this year.

Burying beetles are one of the few beetles to show monogamy and extended parental care. When it’s time to reproduce, a mated pair of burying beetles finds the carcass of a small bird or mammal, digs underneath it to submerge the carcass in the earth, and then raises their larva inside the carcass (larva even beg for food from their parents like baby birds).

While it may sound gross, burying beetles do important work cleaning up dead animals, recycling nutrients, and limiting the spread of disease.

It’s unclear what caused the American burying beetle to decline in the first place, but one theory is that the extinction of the passenger pigeon harmed them by removing a large source of appropriately-sized carcasses (though multiple factors were likely involved). 

Apparently if you put a red band on a male red wing blackbird his harem size can double