odddogblog

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Illustration for Audubon's Let's Go Birding Together initiative!!! 🐦🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

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No children are allowed in the Library of Congress.

It's not that kind of library.

In other words...

You are being lied to

again

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it’s crazy how much diversity there can be in one species…these are all pictures of the same bird species (red-tailed hawk)

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Peeta is a big brother 🐣

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Two sweet friends

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This guy

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It fucking sucks recruiting people for the Breeding Bird Survey, knowing that it's probably going to be cancelled next year if the entire USGS Ecosystems mission area is shuttered

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Serious flop

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It's my 14 year anniversary on Tumblr, I made this blog for the animals in my life and am happy for the folks I’ve interacted with over the years and love seeing other pets and interests. Thanks tumblr, it’s been odd but in a good way.

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Horse people are such a specific type of crazy (I know as I am one myself) because they’ve been staring at their horses for millennia with such meticulous fervor that they’ve developed a kind of weird equine phrenology where owners feel like they can predict a horse’s temperament and behavior just from the pattern of hair swirls (called whorls) on their face. Which results in absolutely unhinged diagrams like this

The craziest thing about this? It is almost certainly based in truth. There has been a decent amount of study into the connection between hair whorls and horse behavior. Many scientists theorize that because these hair patterns develop in the fetal horse at the same time as the nervous system, certain information about a horse’s behavior can be predicted by the whorls.

A 2021 article in Livestock Science explored the genetic heritability of these swirl patterns and found that a whorl on the forehead is highly influenced by genetic factors and could potentially be used to select more docile animals. Temple Grandin researched the phenomenon as well with several studies at Colorado state and made the same connection between the growth of hair whorls and the development of the horse’s brain, leading to certain manifestations of anxiety or docility. Obviously temperament in any animal is more complicated than just genetics or histology, and it would be silly to try and extrapolate a horse’s entire personality from its hair, but the connection is interesting and worth noting all the same.

There is an ancient history to these whorls. An Indian veterinarian mentioned them in a treatise on equine medicine from the third century, and the Bedouin people (who had an extremely developed lore around whorls) used the marks to determine the price of horses prior to sale. It’s pretty cool that our modern understanding of embryology and veterinary medicine is illuminating a phenomenon that ancient people first noted and passed down through folklore.

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Itzel found something enriching to do indoors, lay on a bag of unwrapped giftwrap aka sensory spa. Good beautiful cat

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Sunday

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A new little castle for prince Peeta 🏰

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