There’s some videos on youtube about people who capture wild hawks and train them for falconry.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. If they were raised to be falconry birds then that’s different but capturing a wild hawk for it does not sit well with me.
Hello! I’m a bit out of it this morning so I’m gonna make it a bit brief, but if you want more detail, feel free to ask or message me privately, I love to talk about this stuff.
My post will be very US centric, as i’m located there.
Anyway, in the united states, to trap a raptor for falconry, you have to be permitted. This means you have to have a mentor, an enclosure that has been inspected by the local fish and wildlife service, and have passed a written exam about bird of prey husbandry and training. It is not just anyone trapping a bird willy nilly.
The bird you trap has to be a juvenile, which means it has already left the nest but is still within its first year. The mortality rate for these birds is high, between 80-90%. What people don’t understand is the wild is hard. It’s grueling, its brutal. Very few of these birds survive, and as humans press more into habitats, that mortality rate goes up. In some ways, we owe it to these birds to do something.
The bird is then trained. The bird hunts. The bird is free to go whenever it wishes. With a falconer, the bird is given a steady source of food, water, medical care. My first bird actually had malaria, something my vet predicts he got while still in the nest. He would have died in the wild if not for me.
Most falconers do not keep these birds past two years. It is unfair to the bird to do so. When released, these birds are smarter, better hunters, and will go on to raise better young. With a falconer, they are given the chance to fail without the consequences of failing. From there, they can learn where most of the other juvenile birds do not have that luxury.
Falconry, done properly, has shown to have no ill effects on wild populations. These birds aren’t trapped to be pets. They’re trapped to be hunters, and will eventually go back into the wild to raise better hunters.
there should be a tax that youtubers pay where 1.5% of all of their revenue goes back to Kevin Macleod for basically supplying YouTube with it’s own soundtrack.
who is this man and what music did he make???
if you hear a royalty free song on youtube, there’s approximately an 80% chance Kevin Macleod wrote it.
here’s some you’ve almost definitely heard:
for those wondering, yes, he also made THE generic royalty free song that was EVERYWHERE in 2014.
also, his site incompetech.com also has graph paper generators, if you’re in need of that. It has any kind of graph paper – INCLUDING hex paper, you tabletop gamers out there! (or knitting paper if you’re into that)
basically as visually-oriented beings we judge everything based first on surface aesthetic but organisms are really more defined by the microscopic level so we keep being surprised.
I NEVER get over the fact that jellyfish, or at least some sot of cnidarian, evolved into basically a skin disease at some point.
Myxozoa or “slime animals” are single-celled organisms that grow in the tissues of fish, causing tissue death or serious deformities in the host until they grow into a visible “plasmodium,” just like a slime mold.
They were once thought to be protozoa, but genetic sequencing proved they were cnidarian animals just like jellyfish, sea anemones and corals.
Their drifting “spore” phase even has a microscopic harpoon-like structure derived from what were the stinging cells of their ancestral jellies.
Here’s a bunch of them!
Now what’s even MORE absurd is when genetic sequencing proved a type of parasitic “worm” to be a myxozoan.
So this “worm” is back to being a multi-celled animal that can slither around on its own and has a body symmetry completely unrelated to that of any other cnidarians.
Some sort of jellyfish over millions of years evolved back down to a single-celled form, and then one of those single-celled organisms re-evolved a more animal-like body again, completely and totally different but still genetically a cnidarian! Still equipped with the harpoon cell, too!
insect taxonomy in particular is under constant upheaval as we continue to investigate genetics, vestigial/reduced/internal structures, etc. to determine ancestry. insects are the most diverse body of animals on the planet so it’s a massive task to shift from morphological classification to phenological. and the results are wild.
the most accessible example i have off the top of my head: cockroaches and termites.
used to be separate orders but phenology shows that they are the same order, blattodea.
i am only in my early 30s but when i first learned insect taxonomy in grade school (i got into entomology early) termites were still in the order isoptera. the taxonomic structure changes relatively quickly and it’s constantly being worked on and revised.
it gets weirder. the order blattodea has another close relative, a sort of phenological cousin. they are so close that the two orders form a super-order of which they are the only two members.
guess what that bug is. go ahead and give it a moment’s thought. like, if you had to guess what a cockroach’s closest modern relative is, what would you say?
…
..
…
..
…
..
…
..
…
..
it’s the order mantodea.
the humble cockroach’s closest extant relative are the scythe-wielding man-eating murder machines, the praying mantis
right?!!? crazy! crazy awesome
Oh yeah and this is the thing mantises and roaches evolved from, which is known as a “roachoid!”
The relationship between roaches and termites has proven super important in reptile husbandry, in fact! For a long time, crickets were the staple feeder insect in the hobby. Everyone used crickets (or mealworms, but crickets were generally considered healthier). The cricket virus of 2010 caused a LOT of people to switch to dubia cockroaches.
Except, we saw a lot of reptiles getting gout. This was crazy weird, because a carnivorous reptile should be excellent at handling large amounts of protein. We also started seeing a lot of really young deaths in roach colonies. Ideally, a dubia roach lives 2-3 years. We were seeing dead young adults, or even younger. Like 1-2 molts from being adults. It wasn’t until we started looking into the roach’s food that we sorted things out. See, crickets are fine with consuming huge amounts of protein. It’s what they do.
But roaches don’t. We looked at termites and realized, “hey, these animals are really good at extracting protein from even low protein sources, like wood. Do roaches function the same way as their closest relatives?”
And like… that was exactly it. We were so used to pumping our crickets full of protein that almost no one thought about switching the foods. We were feeding our roaches like crickets, causing kidney failure and completely overloading them with uric acid. That was being transferred to our reptiles.
I’ve never kept reptiles other than catch-examine-release…does your Very Large lizard actually want cuddles from you? Is she, um, bright enough to know you from other humans? Sorry, I am as ignorant as I am curious!
That is actually an EXTREMELY GOOD QUESTION and something I’ve been working on defining for as long as I’ve known Kaiju! It’s hard to describe affection without being anthropomorphic, so I usually approach this question by looking at what I know about reptile behavior and then trying to figure out what specific behavioral sets mean. This is gonna be a long post- it’s something I REALLY LOVE talking about.
Reptiles socialize in ways that are very different from mammals, and this can be really confusing- especially when one of the big things they tolerate humans for is our body heat. Research into reptile behavior suggests that lizards can definitely distinguish between people by scent alone, as well as by sound. It’s not uncommon for captive lizards to recognize their primary keeper- who’s feeding them, who’s interacting with them. Kaiju can actually differentiate between my clothes and other peoples’ clothes (she’s a horrible laundry thief). The people don’t even need to be in them. But beyond that, the most interesting things (in my opinion) happen in larger lizards- things that are big enough not to be everybody’s prey species, things that are able to be a little more confident and less reliant on hiding or running away.
The benchmarks for attention-seeking behavior and and curiosity/interest in humans that isn’t food-driven have been best studied in Komodo dragons due to interest in the zoo industry because encouraging these behaviors has become a key part of Komodo dragon management. These criteria include interacting with human keepers in a non-food context, expressing heightened interest in items that smell like a specific human, and non-predatory non-regulatory behavior- i.e. play. Trooper Walsh, who’s the guy at the National Zoo who got Komodo dragons to breed in captivity and Gordon Burghardt from UT, as well as a bunch of other herpetologists lay it all out in a chapter of Komodo Dragons: Biology and Conservation, which is one of the best books about big reptiles I’ve ever read. An example of both play and preference is seen here- Kraken, the dragon in question, has no reason to want that handkerchief. It’s not food, it doesn’t smell like food, and it doesn’t look like food. And it’s not feeding time! But she’s gonna take it regardless. Kraken was also notorious for stealing shoes and sticking her face in them, which is something Kaiju does as well. (I think that’s Walsh in the video with her.)
Now, Kaiju is a tegu, not a monitor lizard. But a lot of this still applies- tegus are extremely curious. There’s actually an evolutionary advantage to that- they’re scavengers with extremely broad diets, and investigating novel things can have great rewards. Being able to solve problems and work through natural puzzles is beneficial- there’s definitely incentive to be curious and to get highly comfortable with the environment.
There’s also a lot of anecdotal evidence that just… suggests that they like being around people, that they’re interested in what people are doing.
This is one of my favorite videos because it’s really cool visual evidence that these tegus… well, want attention. The human offers food and they’re all far more interested in contact and attention. And I don’t think it’s just these tegus- I think it’s any tegu that’s learned that humans can be trusted. I’ve met a whole bunch of really well-socialized tegus, and they definitely have their people– they’re happy to accept pats and scratches, but at the end of the day, their human is their constant. They’re built for different worlds that the one we live in, and while they are highly adaptable and curious, having something they know is safe to return to is probably very comforting.
So how does this look for my very large lizard in particular? I represent a constant- I’m something that she associates with pleasant things, comfort, and food. But I also represent a continual source of entertainment- I do new, strange things and make odd noises and sometimes dispense food. I pet her- if I don’t, she shoves her face into my hands until I do. Anecdotes aren’t data, and it’s not a rigorous study or anything, but time and again I see her making decisions that put her in proximity to me. I see her scratching at the cage door when I come home. I see her climbing into my bag in the mornings before I go to work, even when she’s got a million other places she could hide. I see her having all this space to move around and regularly choosing to be near me- even when it has nothing to do with thermoregulating or food. When I came in to pick her up from boarding, she fought the lady bringing her out to me and then wouldn’t let me put her down for hours after I got home. It was a struggle to get her in the pet carrier. I see this wild animal falling asleep on my lap, and I have to wonder- this isn’t a dog. This isn’t a cat. She’s not domesticated, and she wasn’t even raised by humans- she’s a feral animal from the swamp in Florida. And yet she feels safe enough to fall asleep on me. I think that means something.
On the way back from the Post Office the other day I noticed this soft toy squished into a pothole on the road. It took me a number of steps to realise what it was I had seen, and I thought to myself that if it was still there the next time I went to the Post Office I’d take it home with me.
So, Pancake was still there today. As you can see he was rather worse for wear and very, very flat. I took him home and gave him a bath as he was Super Gross. He was still super gross after his bath, so I threw him in with the clothes wash and he came out a lot brighter, but still rather deflated. I re-stuffed him and sewed around his flippers because the layers were de-laminating a bit, and now he’s happy and almost as good as new!
I snipped off his label because it was damaged, but he’s apparently an Animal Jam
ifesbob 