Birds of a feather! 🦉🦉

Bird is truly the word!

I am glad people enjoy it so much! I’m surprised we don’t have anything else like it. I think a group like tan eggs could pull off something similar. They’ve got pikas to capybaras. Could be fun to do either concurrently to make it a really big dual event, or do it in June so we get 2 separate events a year.

All the support you guys have given me here has really made a lot of positive impact on my real life as well, traveling places to show you guys owls and now working with them and other animals hands on helping their recovery. I never thought I’d release an owl in my own backyard or hold an owl from Australia!

I’ve had a lot of fun with you personally too, trying to come up with French jokes and seeing you spread some owl love to the French speakers. You’re one of my favorites here!

I’d completely forgotten about the spray. I started with spray deodorants originally, but switched to sticks after getting tired of tasting the overspray.

After that I tried gels, but at least the early ones were always sticky feeling. Not sure if they got better as once I tried the basic green Degree, it had everything I’d wanted from an antiperspirant and thankfully they seemed to have never changed it in all this time.

I have almost exclusively used Degree Sport since it came out probably 20+ years ago. The sole variation has been sometimes I got the powder scent if the sport was sold out and I think I used 2 sample sticks of Old Spice for paid surveys.

The Degree just works, is dirt cheap, and has a texture that doesn’t feel funny. Don’t mess with success.

Aww so cute! It looks like it was its first Fourth of July, still small.

I’m right next to the park where they do the town fireworks and I always feel my terrible for the bats that seem to think it’s the end of the world.

The handful I’ve had to handle seemed very shy. For most, I’d be going to clean the juveniles’ cages, but after they saw me coming to pick them up, they’d usually climb the wall and I would just leave them there while I cleaned up and gave them food.

I had one run on me and be pretty feisty. It didn’t bite, but it did not want to be touched one bit.

We had a momma opossum have a surprise litter and since she was already in an outside pen, she got to raise the family there. They were all extremely pleasant and everyone loved them. Momma was a picky eater, but that was about it.

I’ve really enjoyed seeing how different individual animals’ personalities can be.

One of the last skunk babies we had sprayed someone 4 times before we figured out it was getting freaked out by the orange gloves. Any of the other gloves and it was fine.

I haven’t spent near as much hands on time with the oppossums as I had wanted, but the times I have had to grab them, they tend to act scary, but then not really do anything if their tough guy act didn’t get me to leave.

I’ve got tons of pics of them. I think they’re very adorable.

This is the last batch of joeys we incubated.

I grabbed this guy to move it to an outdoor enclosure.

This one is coming out after I dropped off breakfast.

Wawa is pretty much always the real start of a trip for me. Top off the gas, check tires, grab something with caffeine and a Sizzli or soft pretzels, and then I know I’m as ready to roll as in going to be!

It hasn’t been bad so far. The way I’m getting it is an interdermal shot instead of intermuscular, so it’s a shallow injection with a small needle. It feels like a bug bite, a minor skin bump, I didn’t have any itching, but it hurts really bad if I forget it’s there and scratch it by accident. The first injection is still visible, which I’ve never had from another shot, but otherwise I don’t feel it, so I’m thinking it’s not abnormal, but I’ll ask tomorrow.

I was extremely tired the next day, but I have been sleeping like crap all year and I had to drive 6 hours round trip, so it’s probably just that. The shots are very expensive, and the place I’m going is doing a clinic where we can use the same vial of vaccine for multiple people, so it’s saving us all a ton of money.

Even with all the gas money, I’m still saving at least $500 on the shots. Plus I stopped to see a pair of nice waterfalls and listened to a whole Discworld audiobook on trip one. Tomorrow I think I’ll hit up the state college’s store where they sell the ice cream they make in their special ice cream program and maybe hit up the wildlife rescue out there if the rain is light.

I always love to hear it. It makes my day better to talk to you guys about owls and misc other animals too.

Owl of the Year Qualifier starts sometime next month, so be sure to come play along!

Strictly not pets, but I’m getting my 2nd of 3 pre-exposure rabies vaccinations this weekend so I can work with skunks and the other rabies vector species (bats, coyotes, fox, groundhogs, raccoons) next spring!

While I haven’t been able to handle them, I have prepared their food. Out of all the baby animals formulas we have, skunk milk smells the best!

I joined up to work with the owls and other raptors, but all the animals we get are fascinating in their own ways.

That’s awesome! Glad to help out.

That’s my situation as well. Was only a reddit lurker, but I spend more time talking with people here as there’s room for me to be heard through the crowd.

People can still doomscroll here if they choose, but my participation here has led to me doing volunteer work and having countless unique experiences. All I got from reddit was a solid coffee setup.

This comment reminded me of the short story The Road Not Taken.

Fun read for anyone that hasn’t. It’s Earth’s first encounter with an alien race that has developed faster than light travel, only to find out that has put both our civilizations on very different tech trees.

PDF

YouTube

Whoa, that’s a pretty awesome tecolotyl! I’m glad you’re still enjoying all the owls.

If OP is just looking to browse and maybe make the occasional post or comment, any of the clients people recommend are going to be fine. But for anyone active here, Summit has really aided my productivity, it’s very customizable to my style tastes and my workflow, and the dev is very active here and has been an amazing help taking people’s feedback and lightning fast bug fixes. I don’t know if I’d be as active here as I am without Summit being what it is, and I’m very grateful for it.

Summit is where it’s at!

I don’t want to discount others’ stories, I’m sure at least many of them are true. Every body is different and every doctor is different. It still seems to be an all-around safer approach to birth control with less frequent side effects than the methods there are for women, at least to my understanding.

My partner is on enough meds for other things that figuring out a hormone balancing routine on top of that seemed burdensome. When I got my gallbladder removed, I told them to just add on the vasectomy while I was out already.

I was a bit concerned when I woke up, as I thought it was supposed to be relatively painless and my crotch was killing me worse than the pain from the gallbladder stuff. Once I could stand up though, I figured out the supporter they put on my had been bunched up and was cutting off circulation or pinching a nerve or something like that, so once I fixed that, it was just mild discomfort.

It’s nice not having to worry about the effectiveness of other birth control methods now. I found the whole concept very liberating. I’d whole-heartedly recommend it, but like any other operation, there is going to be a non-zero chance of risk. For most people, it’s a mundane thing you will rapidly forget you even did it, but like anything else, the people who take the time to post about it are going to be the ones with negative experiences, so diy research can end up being a bit disproportionate.

It looks like the organs/corneas were from people that died without knowing they had it. That seems to have been the only way it’s ever been spread human to human.

This story of a girl who got bit, developed symptomatic rabies, and survived says she got bit by a bat and it didn’t even bleed, so her mom put peroxide on it and they thought she was fine. She was ok for over a month.

As a trained squirrel handler, while it’s not impossible for a squirrel to get rabies, there is probably a single digit number of them out there at any given moment.

At least in the US, no one has ever gotten rabies from a squirrel.

Your rabies prone species are bats, coyotes, fox, groundhogs, raccoons, and skunks.

That said, it’s unadvisable to touch any wild animals. (Though I’d still boop that squirrel.)