I am very pleased that there is a very strong favorable bias for turacos on this website, you all have wonderful taste to appreciate these beautiful birds. And I just got so enthused that I had to talk about just how cool they are!
Turacos have come up with some very unique feather pigments that are found in no other birds. Most birds that are green aren’t actually green-pigmented: their feathers are yellow, with some cool feather structures that bend light to blue, and the combination of course makes green to our eyes. (This is why a green parrot taking a bath looks yellowish: the usual effect doesn’t work when the feathers are wet, so the yellow pigment is more obvious.)
But turacos have a true green pigment, called turacoverdin. As far as we yet know, it only exists in turacos, and thus turacos are the only green birds that are actually green (as it appears to us) instead of yellow-with-blue-light-tricks. And that’s not all: they have bright red wing feathers, but that red pigment is also unique to turacos. Yes, there’s other birds with red feathers, from the bright red cardinals to the rusty-cinnamon of a red-tailed hawk, but turacos are once again unique, making their copper-based red pigment, called turacin, in a totally different way from those other birds.
(Prince Ruspoli’s Turaco in flight, showing those green and red feathers with such cool pigments. Image source, photo by Fran Trabalon.)
Also, their scientific family name, Musophagidae, means “banana-eaters,” and they do indeed love a banana, along with other fruits, flowers, and the occasional insect and other invertibrates. Their close cousins, who lack their colorful plumage, are the mostly-brown plaintain-eaters, and the mostly-grey go-away-birds.
While going on another turaco appreciation spree I wanted to reblog this post I made last year where I discussed their fantastic unique colors. Turacos are good birds.
i love this guy 60% of every video is him rolling around on the floor screaming while his camera guy goes “hey….. u ok?” then 5 minutes later he gets up and is like “ok folks, there u have it, the Satan DeathRay Fire Monster actually does cause pain when it bites u. science is great”
To be fair, this is actually a really good way of getting kids to realize that these animals really are dangerous, and he goes through the first aid either on the same video or in a follow up video (if it’s something complicated). IIRC, the whole reason he started doing videos like this was because while he was in Montana or something he saw a lot of Facebook posts about people whose dogs had gotten too close to a porcupine and they didn’t know how to remove the quills, so he (naturally) went into the woods, found a porcupine, quilled himself and filmed himself taking the quills out and explaining what he was doing.
He’s still fucking insane, but, you know, it’s for a good cause
He’s living his best life, his job is getting hurt on camera and educating others on how to be safe. And he clearly loves his job.
help I’m 90% sure this is one of those morel mushrooms that people will die for its growing directly outside my apartment…I think it sprouted during the thunderstorms we had last night but I’ve never seen one in person before. is this a thing I can eat??? isn’t this one of those??? there’s a whole patch here growing under a carefully landscaped tree outside my college apartment????
I’m no expert, but it does look like some type of “yellow” morel. Being from MT, I’ve not really had experience with morels occurring outside of burn areas, but it does happen in other places.
Most of the morel look-alikes don’t really look anything like morels in my experience, certainly the one that seems to most commonly be called the “false morel” (Gyromitra esculenta) looks nothing like it. The Wrinkled Thimble Cap (Verpa bohemica) is somewhat closer.
Cut this one in half lengthwise and see if it is hollow. Hollow = true morel.
I’m not an expert, but morels are one of the mushrooms I do feel confident enough about IDing to eat. My first thought seeing that one? Between the shape and the growth habit, it looks more like some type of stinkhorn. It’s also pretty late in the year for morels.
Older Phallus impudicus specimens are occasionally mistaken for yellow morels. After the spore-bearing slime has been picked clean by insects, the pitted and ridged surface of the cap can resemble the cap of a morel. Since stinkhorns are hollow, and since the smell is not always as foul as it frequently is, it’s easy to see why misidentification occurs. However, stinkhorns typically grow in summer, rather than spring–and a close examination will usually reveal traces of the slime.
unpopular opinion but it’s cool if you don’t want to be in love
like, idk. I used to feel so compelled to make excuses for being single, whether it was self-deprecating jokes about myself or insisting that I was too busy for a relationship or making myself go out on uncomfortable and pointless dates just to make a show of trying to not be single. there’s such an expectation that if you’re single you should be actively working of changing that, and it’s like. nah. there are 9999 other things you can be focusing your time and energy on and if you don’t really feel like being in a relationship now or ever that’s cool.
one of the oldest and arguably the most important museum in Brazil is burning to the ground as we speak. home to the portuguese royal family from 1808 to 1821, the Museu Nacional stored fossils, meteorites, pre-historic human skeletons and a variety of artefacts related to natural history. it holds two centuries of latin & brazilian history and now it’s all gone.
some of the things that are now lost forever: the largest collection of egyptian artefacts in latin america; the skeleton of the largest flying reptile ever found in Brazil; the oldest human fossil ever found in the country, named “Luzia” (over 11.000 y.o) and other 20 million extremely important relics and researches just burned to the ground. never to be seen again.
thanks to our government, of course, who didn’t want to pay the museum the necessary funds to make the essencial maintenances since 2014 (which by the way, costed less than a supreme federal court judge’s sallary: R$520 in a year).
another sad instance where the state’s indifference towards culture and history becomes painfully obvious. this is a massive blow to our cultural legacy.
all that in our independe week. happy independe for us, brazilians, who just lost our history and culture in a fire caused by ignorance and indifference.
in case you’re wondering, this is what the museum used to look like:
this is what it looks like now:
thousands of years of culture lost. happy independence week.
“Authorities say the fire lasted for six hours, causing irreparable damage. To put it bluntly: it’s all gone. A meteorite, that can sustain incredibly high temperatures, was found intact. But other than that, there are apparently no other pieces left. It would not be an understatement to call the Museu Nacional the Brazilian equivalent of the Louvre or the British Museum.”
here is some of the international news saying on this, because most articles and videos are all in portuguese, u can check some of the news in english: (here *new york times*) (here *bbc news*) (here *le monde* for french speaking readers) (here *shorouk news* for people who speak arabian) (here *azteca news* for spanish) (here *corriere della sera* for italian).
it was a natural science and historic museum, there were all sorts of important researches and relics. all burned. this was our culture. our history. the first human fossil found in brazil (mentioned above, Luzia) was so important for science, since it proved that way before indigenous tribes existed in Brazil, there were black people.
this is the place where our first constitution was made and the declaration of independence was signed. our independe day is this friday. heartbroken.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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