Chloe. 21. INFP. London, England.
2nd Year Zoology Student.
Mostly memes, a few fandoms and animal/nature content.
It’s a pine fall day today in Russia.
Things just happen in Russia in a unique way that I’m not sure can ever be explained. Like how a fucking meteor landed in the middle of the Russian wilderness and resulted in the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off but no one really even noticed.
Anonymous asked:Can you talk about why the passenger pigeon went extinct? we were breeding pigeons LONG BEFORE them so why did conservation fail so badly?
At the time, extinction was an utterly alien concept. It was like suggesting a Trump presidency in the 1990’s. You have to understand: this was the MOST populous bird in North America. Flocks could potentially take HOURS to pass by overhead.
This super gregarious nature made them easy prey. Particularly large tunnel nets could catch as many as 3,500 birds in a single go.
i’m gonna talk about how these birds nested for a bit: so a mommy pigeon and a daddy pigeon would settle down to raise a family, along with thousands of their closest friends. These babies would grow really, REALLY fat. Parent pigeons wouldn’t wait until their baby could fly. They’d just take off and leave the baby to figure it out on its own. These nestlings would be particularly vulnerable to predators (including humans). Now, for most of passenger pigeon history, this didn’t really matter. Most predators could eat their fill and not make a dent in the literal millions of pigeons.
And then the railroads came. Finally, humans had a way to DELIVER millions of pigeon corpses all across America. They didn’t just hunt until they weren’t hungry anymore. We could hunt more and more and GET MONEY FOR IT. This was actually embraced by society as a whole, since passenger pigeons were ‘agricultural pests’. The first attempt to protect their population was in 1857 and it was laughed out of the Committee. The birds were described as “wonderfully prolific”.
By the 1870’s, their population was noticeably smaller and conservation groups took action.
It didn’t go well. Despite laws, people continued to trap and kill the birds because ‘eeeeyyyy there’s still plenty to go around!’ People were looking at distinct populations rather than the one as a whole. It was the modern version of going, “we’re not in a drought because it rained YESTERDAY”.
Captive breeding didn’t go well either because these birds NEEDED huge flocks to reproduce. No flock, no reproduction. Zoos with as many as 250 birds STILL couldn’t get them to raise their babies. Today, we MIGHT have had a chance using the mirror trick (flamingos are frequently induced to breed by setting up mirrors to make them feel like they’re surrounded by 20 of their best friends).
So, to answer: it was a many-fold mistake. Large-scale hunting, rapid habitat loss, and an understanding of their social needs that came far too late.
To add some further perspective: It’s estimated that at one point passenger pigeons made up ¼th of the bird life in the United States.
In less than a decade we were able to drive to extinction the most numerous species of bird in the world, ¼th of all the birds in the United States. Think of the massive hole that must have left in so many ecosystems.
Nothing is safe from us.
“in this essay i will explore” memes piss me off because it implies y’all still using first person pronouns when writing academically. childish ass
feigning authorial distance is a coward’s move. get in the fucking pit and fight for your argument
i’m terrified of sounding mean on the internet so i always add too many exclamation marks and smiley faces but i think it makes me sound like a primary school teacher
2019 is coming up and if i don’t become louder than god’s revolver and twice as shiny then what’s the point
I dont know what this means or what its referencing; but like, #mood
Reblog to make the future bulletproof and the aftermath secondary.
what does it mean when a guy says hi to you
he’s lying
to everyone taking exams: u gon be ok. we gon be ok.
“in this essay i will explore” memes piss me off because it implies y’all still using first person pronouns when writing academically. childish ass
feigning authorial distance is a coward’s move. get in the fucking pit and fight for your argument
i’m terrified of sounding mean on the internet so i always add too many exclamation marks and smiley faces but i think it makes me sound like a primary school teacher
