The other day I got a bug up my ass about lake Natron, because I’ve seen the photos of the calcified remains of animals that took a dip in the lake on accident, but I’ve only seen those photos in black and white. I’m sure you’ve seen them.
I thought, you know, calcified remains should be really interesting to see in color, so I tried to find some that had been taken by others, in color. It was not nearly as visual stunning, they were just white rotting remains, I won’t scar anyone by posting them.
But what caught my eye wasn’t the dead. It was the fucking lake.
It’s BLOOD fucking RED.
It’s super alkaline (deadly), blood fucking red (terrifying), and oh, it gets to be 106F/41C in the water. Red spirulina algae thrives here and provides food for the main denizen of the lake…. fucking lesserflamingos.
Look at their fucking mud nests!
You need to leave!! You have found flamingo Silent Hill!! What are you still doing here!! I’ll tell you!! They’re still doing there because literally the death lake protects them from predators, nothing big enough to be a threat to them gets across the lake to get them. There are millions of them living there safely.
What the fuck. what the FUCK nature. This is some of the most amazing shit you’ve ever pulled and hardly anyone knows about it. I’m on to you. I see your blood lake with your pink goth bird decorations. I see you.
One of my favorite thing I’ve learned about animals studies is that you should avoid using colorful leg bands when you’re banding birds because you can accidentally completely skew the data because female birds prefer males with colorful bands
Apparently if you put a red band on a male red wing blackbird his Harlem size can double
So like you can completely frick up the natural reproduction of a group of birds by giving a guy a bracelet so stylish that females CANNOT resist him
so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie – the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels – it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’rerealizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.
finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’
and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’
and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’
and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’
and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’
the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.
and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.
It’s not likely normal but I don’t see it as being unusual. Birds that hunt fish probably occasionally screw up their trajectory so it make sense that they’d know how to swim if they really bomb, right?
I’ll be the first to admit I thoroughly enjoy all the “holy shit, Australia” posts that circulate around here but I feel like there’s a very important caveat when it comes to the discussion of swooping season that no one seems to mention.
For those not aware, swooping season is when the magpies start to nest and turn into mini dive-bombers comprised of talons, feathers and spite. It’s not fun. I bled heavily after a particularly vicious swoop when I was a kid, and I’m definitely not the only one.
But here’s the thing: swooping is not an innate behaviour. It’s a learned one. I realised this the moment I moved out of home and began my decade long (entirely unintentional) habit of moving to a different suburb every two years.
I’ve met a lot of wildlife, walking everywhere as I do. And I’ve met a lot of magpies – hella intelligent creatures that are probably thinking “what the fuck is this chick doing” every time I say hi to them as I walk past.
When I first moved out of home, I automatically started taking notes on areas I saw magpies in preparation for swooping season. It was just the done thing. It wasn’t until September came and went and the magpies in my area continued their quizzical but otherwise completely non-aggressive behaviour that it started to twig with me.
The next few years of moving around solidified my suspicions.
Anytime I lived close to a school or in an area with a high concentration of families with young kids, the magpies would swoop. Any suburb (usually inner city) with a high concentration of childless households and/or share-houses: no swooping to be seen.
And it’s any goddamn wonder.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve yelled at kids for messing with wildlife. I grew up in the outer suburbs, so there was no shortage of mini-assholes with an empathy shortage. Australian kids will poke anything they can reach with a stick, and throw rocks at everything else. Including birds nests.
Magpies are intelligent as hell, and they remember shit for GENERATIONS. Some human-shaped fucker throwing rocks at them and their nests? That’s something that’d stick.
So anytime you read one of those “lol the birds try to kill us here” posts, remember: it’s not the birds that started that shit – it was the asshole humans.
Adding on to the fact that magpies are super intelligent:
In primary school there were these really huge gum trees in which a family of magpies took up residence one year.
(an important thing to note is that I grew up in the country with A LOT of magpies -that were basically like relatives for the amount of time they spent on the veranda- and never encountered any swooping)
So one morning walking in to school I noticed that all the kids ahead of me were giving the really huge gum trees a wide berth, with other kids shouting warnings from the buildings. Being an airy-headed little kid, I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were actually saying, so I just kept walking straight under the trees.
Nothing happened.
I got to the buildings and asked why everyone was making a big fuss about the trees, and one of my friends just pointed back the way I came and said “the birds!”
And sure enough, any of the other kids that tried to walk under the trees got immediately swooped and chased to what the magpies thought was a good distance from their nests.
Magpies not only remember humans that are mean to them, but they recognise humans that have been given the seal of approval by other magpies.
For the last 40+ years there’s been a rapidly growing family of magpies at my grandparents house.
The lady next door would feed them every morning and they would do that beautiful warble. After she died my grandad started feeding them. Everyday.
They come to the same place everyday and wait for him, he used to take my sister and I as kids to help him feed the magpies and it was honestly a highlight of our visits. He still does it with our younger cousins.
They’ve never swooped anyone in the family, they scare off cats that try and get in my grandmas garden and they sing for my grandparents everyday.
Last year my grandad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He sometimes forgets what he’s doing and what he was saying and repeats conversations over and over.
Sometimes he’s late to feed the magpies, and they wait. It’s kinda like they know. They’ll come right up to the house and gently tap on the window to remind him, and he’s so happy to see them and feed them.
Magpies are beautiful birds, and anyone that thinks otherwise is probably a dick to them.
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