what's crackin

…which means it’s time for an annual reminder not to kidnap baby birds. Fact: most species of birds have almost no sense of smell. Someone probably told you that if you touch a baby bird, the mother will smell you on it and reject her baby. THAT IS NOT THE CASE. If you’ve found a baby bird and you touched it, all is not lost, you can still return it to mom and dad!

Pictured: a young Mourning Dove, after being rescued from the tender mercies of my dog, circa spring 2005. It’s a fledgling! Note how it has most of its feathers, but still looks a bit awkward and scruffy, and, being unable to properly fly, can be caught by an elderly husky or a child. 

Help, I found a baby bird on the ground, what do I do???

Hatchlings/Nestlings: IF it is naked or covered in fluffy down and/or pinfeathers and cannot flutter successfully, it’s a hatchling or nestling, and has fallen from its nest prematurely. Look for the nest- if you find it and can reach it, return baby and then leave and let the parents return. If you can’t find the nest, or if you find it in pieces on the ground, use a small box/yogurt container lined with dried grass and attach as close as possible to where you found the bird or where you think the nest was. If it’s cold, warm it in your hands for a few minutes before putting it back. RETURN BABY!!!! 

Fledglings: If you spot a young bird covered with feathers (may have a few patches of fluff) on the ground, it’s a fledgling (bird tween) who is currently working on flying 101 homework, which is normal and fine. Hanging out on the ground is part of the learning to fly process! If it looks like it’s in immediate danger (i.e. of being run over, stepped on, or eaten by a cat or dog), the best thing you can do for it is to gently scoop it up and place it in the low branches of a nearby tree or shrub, and then LEAVE. The parents are likely nearby watching, and will return once the coast is clear. If it flutter-hops away from you and you can’t catch it, then don’t worry! It just successfully avoided a predator (you), and therefore can probably continue to do so. LEAVE BABY ALONE!!!

DO NOT: Try to feed it, bring it into your house or car, or take it to your local domestic animal vet or shelter. 

STUPID: Is what you are saying stupid?

HAUGHTY: Are your words arrogant and disdainful?

INCONSIDERATE: Are others insulted or inconvenienced by what you are saying?

Here's this year's intergrade Northern Flicker chart! A few old faces still hanging around from past years, which is always a treat, but I've got some real weird newbies, too. "Yellow" there even has his own nickname in my head because he stands out so much.

For those who missed past years' posts: I live in the intergrade zone for Northern Flickers and usually get a bunch of them in my yard every winter. Probably every 5 out of 6 flickers at my suet feeder is an intergrade - it's a really unusually high rate! Since each one has a unique head pattern, I keep track of individuals and enjoy drawing portraits for them every year.

Most Northern Flickers are either red-shafted (primarily western) or yellow-shafted (primarily eastern). Each of these two groups comes with a predictable head pattern and underwing color. The intergrades shuffle all of those pieces and recombine them!

@staff

For years, the total note count on a post served as a universal metric of a piece of content's impact. Whether a user liked the original post or a reblog fifteen branches deep, that engagement flowed back to the source. This ensured that the original artist, writer, or editor received the full credit for the viral success of their work.

Under this new system, engagement is trapped within the specific reblog a user happens to see on their dashboard. If a massive, high-traffic blog reblogs a piece of art from a small creator, every like and reblog that occurs through that larger account stays with them. The original creator is left with a stagnant note count on their own dashboard while their work generates thousands of interactions for someone else.

Erasure of Creator Visibility

Instead of seeing one post with 10,000 notes, a creator may now have to hunt through dozens of different reblog chains to find where the conversation is actually happening.

If the notes no longer flow back to the original post, the creator loses the ability to see who is enjoying their work, what the tags say, and how the community is responding.

On a platform where engagement often dictates visibility, splitting that engagement into tiny, unlinked fractions makes it significantly harder for original works to gain momentum compared to the high-reach blogs that reblog them.

Incentivizing the "Big Blog" Monopoly

This system rewards accounts that have already established a large following at the direct expense of the smaller accounts that actually produce the content. It transforms reblogging from a method of sharing into a method of acquisition.

When a reblog functions as its own independent post with its own note count, the incentive to click through to the original source disappears. The platform is transitioning from a collaborative ecosystem into a standard social media feed where the person who posts the content last—not the person who made it—reaps the rewards.

Impact on Collaborative Conversations

Tumblr’s unique culture is built on the reblog chain: a chronological, evolving conversation. By allowing users to like or reblog "any part" of the chain as an independent entity, the platform is breaking the narrative thread.

If engagement is siloed into specific branches, the incentive to add to a conversation is replaced by an incentive to simply own a piece of the engagement. This change doesn't encourage conversation. It encourages the commodification of individual posts within a chain, making it harder for the original voice to ever be heard over the noise of the rebloggers.

The Disincentive to Create

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this update is the psychological toll on the creative community. When the platform actively diverts credit and engagement away from the source, it destroys the motivation to share original work at all.

For many, the reward for posting is seeing how far their work travels. If that travel is now invisible or attributed to others, the labor of creating becomes thankless.

This system makes creators want to share nothing. If the platform is built to harvest a creator's effort for the benefit of curator blogs, the logical response is to stop providing the raw material. I am one leaning into this category. Without us creators, the curator blogs have nothing to curate.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a zoo or aquarium in the United States speak up broadly about AI. (The only times I can think of any comment at all has maybe individual instances when a deepfake of “their” animal escaping is circulating.) And they did a great job with this piece! It’s succinct, easy to read, and written in a way that doesn’t shame people for engaging with AI content before they knew better.

I think this is exactly the type of resource needed for sending to that family member or friend we all have - the one who isn’t aware of the slop issue and constantly sends you clearly fake videos because they’re “so cute.”

six months later i re-read the essay prior to the final exam, went 'ohhhh yeah i remember this', got a question on that topic, and aced it.

The reason OP could bullshit a decent essay in a 30 minute bus ride is because OP knew how to write and craft a well-reasoned analysis thanks to a childhood full of writing and critical thinking practice.

But everyone knew that this was cheating. If someone got caught, they would be in trouble. They wouldn't openly tell their teacher "yeah I didn't have time so my sister wrote it -- efficient, huh?" If someone in a parent-teacher meeting had said to a teacher "it's not fair that you won't accept this essay that I wrote and put my child's name on!", everyone would agree that that parent had lost the fucking plot. The kid writes their own essay, that's the point of the essay. To teach the kid and to allow the teacher to assess their knowledge. The teacher doesn't set these things because they really love spending an afternoon grading fucking essays.