Airis | 26 | ♀ Edgelord at heart but annoying meanie in practice. do not perceive me // Check out my art blog @era-eternal if you want to be cool and sexy like me
I’m obsessed with this dude’s videos. The dialogue and cuts feel like they were ripped out of a Wes Anderson movie but it also doesn’t feel like he’s trying to mimic Wes Anderson
Seeing people shoot raptors in other countries is fucking wild to me because we have a whole system of super strict laws governing how you can handle an individual FEATHER off of an eagle, and it doesn’t have to even be a dead eagle. One can molt and you can find it on the ground and if you’re caught with it the warden will fuck your entire life. What do you mean people are out there shooting them to protect a fucking pheasant. A pheasant??? That thing I have to avoid running over approximately 459 times any time I leave a major highway???
My good friend @prismaticate has asked a very good question here, and while I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to explain it and would love some input from more qualified sources, my SUPER simplified understanding of why the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its numerous modern revisions and addendums have clauses about this included is this:
-It’s basically impossible to tell a feather that’s been picked up off the ground from one that’s been taken from a poached bird
-This used to be a MAJOR problem when bird-feather hats and the like were in high demand back in the day, because several bird species on the edge of extinction kept getting poached in spite of the new laws protecting them since people would just say they “found” any feathers from protected species used in the stuff they were selling, and you couldn’t prove otherwise unless you literally caught them in the act of poaching
-This eventually got SO bad that they had to just make it illegal to have the feathers at all, with certain exceptions made for members of different indigenous groups, or authorized organizations that display them as part of efforts to educate the public about the species they belong to
@zooophagous is this a reasonable rundown? Was there anything I missed/any better sources you might recommend to learn more about this? I know it’s probably far more nuanced than that, but this was kind of the explanation I’d always seen floating around. 😅
That’s pretty much the gist of it! Eagles and eagle feathers have more laws on top of that because of their sacred uses in certain indigenous practices, how they relate to legal falconry, and because eagles at one time were highly endangered while at the same time being a national symbol. Where a cop or a game warden may shrug and look the other way if you, say, illegally picked up a chickadee feather from your bird feeder, if they see a real eagle feather they will notice and will be VERY interested in where it came from.
Not long ago here someone was arrested and charged for violating these laws because they tried to sell a plains feather bonnet at a pawn shop, claiming they had “found it while exploring an abandoned house.”
The clerk suspected it was real eagle, the warden confirmed it was, and because those feathers are so tightly tracked they were able to locate the family of the previous owners who said the item had been stolen some time ago.
If nobody knows you have it, obviously you can get away with it. But if they see it, or God forbid you try to SELL it, the hammer will fall.
Im surprised every time people think it’s a crazy sounding law, it is genuinely one of the only things preventing a lot of native birds from extinction or any asshole could kill as many as they want and just say they found them on the ground
Wait, poaching wasn’t about the meat, it was about the feathers?
The collapse of bird populations in the USA in the late 1800s thru early 1900s was very much about feathers.
At its peak the feather trade had feathers that were worth more than gold. Commercial hunters would shoot birds out of the sky and sell feathers by the pound, in literal huge crates. Egrets were especially sought after for their beautiful breeding plumage, which was used in fancy hats and accessories. This wrought havoc on the poor birds because they only ever had this plumage during breeding season, so not only were the breeding birds dying, they were leaving next generation’s chicks and eggs behind to die of neglect.
Beyond hats, the gentleman’s art of fly tying was also a popular art form, more for the sake of showing off one’s rare collection of feathers and art than for actual fishing.
There was some meat hunting as well before the banning of commercial hunting, mostly ducks and geese, which also drifted close to extinction as they were taken to be sold in markets.
Even white tailed deer, the ubiquitous animal that’s found all over north America in truly ridiculous numbers, came dangerously low. But meat wasn’t where the money was when it came to birds. It was feathers.
The Lacey act banned commercial hunting in the United States, putting an end to the constant unregulated commercial killing to fill market stalls with meat (which incidentally is why you don’t see venison in most supermarkets in the states. Only farmed deer is legally allowed to be sold.)
And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act made it a crime to not only kill a bird, but to even posess a single feather from one. Most people won’t buy a hat that would get them arrested if they wore it outside, so the market for feathers was gutted.
Even though feather hats aren’t popular in this day and age, nobody is in a hurry to amend these laws, as birds in general are well loved and popular animals and still very much threatened by other stressors such as pollution and habitat loss.
I just want to add to the beautiful explanations above that even with these comprehensive laws, that do indeed continue to have a profound effect on bird protections in the Unitest States… There are people who do still shoot raptors, out of a mostly-misguided belief that they’re protecting their livestock, or because they’re assholes with guns who want to see proof they hit a moving target.
When I worked bird rehab, a fair number of our unreleasable education birds were hawks that had been shot, and their resulting injuries would never allow them to fly well enough to be released. Obviously this is still very much illegal! But it’s a lot harder to find someone to charge when you don’t catch them in the act of selling parts of a bird, and that makes investigating these crimes tougher.
So that was one of the things we did when we did public presentations with our unreleasables. We talked about how this beautiful Swainson’s hawk had been migrating south, maybe even from as far as the Canadian prairie provinces, on her way to maybe as far as Argentina, when she’d been shot by some asshole, and would never make that trip again. We talked about how someone had shot this goofy turkey vulture, despite the fact that he would’ve had no interest in anyone’s livestock unless that livestock was already dead. And so on!
The goal, of course, was to explain how it was not only illegal for them to have been shot (and what penalties there were for that), but show the aftermath of the shooting, the partial wing amputations and how the birds could no longer fly. Hopefully the people we presented to would carry that on with them and spread the word further!
the kicker is he was being asked if his work was coming from the approach of man vs. nature aka “THE ENVIRONMENT STRIKES BACK” but no. his literal words were along the lines of “sharks are not very scary if you are never in the water so i had to make them scarier, and now they have legs.”
Junji Ito has the best fucking take on horror, which is ‘wouldn’t that be weird’ and then he draws it into the most terrifying thing possible.
One of his strangest stories is about a cursed type of honey that, when ingested, is guaranteed to be the best thing you’ve ever tasted. But, if you consume it, you have a 25% of being flattened like a pancake by a giant tree demon. Characters eat it, get addicted, and that addiction forces them to risk it over and over again until they eventually get turned into a gory puddle by this ghost tree thing.
It’s a weird story, but the funny part is that Ito wrote it because he thought it would suck to be a mosquito.
no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened
it’s such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like “there’s a hand there”
Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”
Brain is like “nice”
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
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