Jäegers

Jäegers

Jäegers

The jägers are a clade of terrestrial, predatory fantails native to Crescentia, although some species (primarily jaegerdrossel) can be found in Omnedomum. The most basal jägers are the aforementioned jagerdrossel, thrush-like predators that supplement their diet of large invertebrates with songbirds and small lizards. More derived are the harrierhens, filling niches akin to Terran foxes, but most cases maintaining the ability to fly, with one species having reached the tropical rainforests of Omnedomum and with others filling the niche of apex predator on many islands in the T-SIC (Trans-Straits Island Chain). Despite their continued success, their diversity in recent millennia has decreased due to competition with the more robust larklynx. Finally are the typical jägers, including groups such as the phoros, jägerhirsch and mohawks, the latter two having evolved keratinous spurs amongst for intraspecies fights amongst males. These birds are medium to large pursuit hunters, chasing flocks of fanfowl, rheapidura and other ground birds, typically avoiding the sturdier iguanas.

The lunar harrierhen is the most basal representative of an extremely successful group of jägers, the fowks. These nocturnal predators hunt a variety of lizards, birds and large invertebrates. The lunar harrierhen in particular is native to much of southern crescentia, being especially prevalent in the fog forests in the eastern side of the Boss range, stalking the forest floors from the setting of the sun till it flutters up to rest in the canopy come the break of dawn.

The konigsjager is another denizens of these woodlands. Unlike most other jagerhirsch, this titanic avian is not a swift pursuit predator, but a powerful ambush hunter, specialising in the large iguanas dwelling amidst the fog. These giants have only recently claimed their title, having evolved from a fairly typical lithe jäger less than 2 million years ago, dwelling to its great size in the absence of the predatory iguanas to the north and a population crash of the local macropredatory larklynx following an outbreak of a transmissible cancer similar to that which decimated the Tasmanian devils of earth.

A rare visitor to these cramped forests, the fire-crested mohawk is a classic example of a typical jäger. Patrolling the highland grasslands and open woodland of the Boss range, they form fission-fusion packs to pursue the swift grazing birds that feed upon the herbs, grasses and heaths. During spring the males group into leks and compete for females attention, singing and flashing their bright red crests and, if a winner cannot be decided by looks alone, coming to blows with talons and spurs.

The western scaly-shouldered jagerdrossel is a member of a species complex encircling the Boss range. Fairly large for a jagerdrossel, these birds hunt songbirds and large invertebrates amongst the undergrowth and branches, pursuing their prey on foot or chasing them in rapid bursts of flight, subduing prey with swift pecks from a hooked bill and stabs from an enlarged second toe.

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ty for the tag @fear-is-truth :p

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1 month ago
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Tags
3 months ago

Car lights - James Marriot

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

4 months ago

Some say magic died when a hail of shellfire tore an ancient god asunder. Others say it died when the whistle of engines dragged an old world kicking and screaming into a new one. Yet more say it died when the wheels of progress ground the very building blocks of the universe apart into ordered lists and categories. It has been said it died when some long lost soul first harnessed the all consuming light of fire to keep away greater evils that haunted the shadows.

But magic is not dead.

If you venture long enough into the wild lands you can find it, scorched and scarred, battered but not broken. Ancient beings who’s rattling voices sing ballads of fall and fallow; Good People who ask for your name and offer you a deal; silent colossi passing beneath trees that reach to the heavens; beasts that stalked the flickering borders of ancient campfires, and kind travellers who no longer know how long they have wandered these lands.

If you follow the coast you can find it, hear it in faint songs barely distinguishable above the breaking of the waves; see it in the dark shapes that glide over the reefs and shoals; be told of it in epic tales as sailors boast of their victories, and if you stay you might overhear whispers of awe and dread of the rage and might of what dwells within pelagic storms, those spirits who never returned from the sea, and the unfathomable might of leviathans known only to the cachalot and those rare few glimpsing a shadow in the depths.

If you travel through the country you can find it, temples of corrugated metal and bricks; archaic machines held together with welds, duct tape and dimly glowing runes; laughing farmhands heaving clods of soil from the earth to lob at eachother; faerie rocks jeering from the centre of a plowed field; forgotten gods standing motionless amongst the wheat; long abandoned churches that never fall into disrepair; half forgotten sigils carved into fence posts to ward off the Things in the night, and the eyes that yet still burn like red moons between the stalks of corn.

In the cities you can find it, in the prophecies etched and sprayed upon the subway walls by robed sages and masked youths; in the pig iron shrines to gods of the forge tucked in every nook and cranny of a foundry; in the clubs and bars that you can only find when you are shown them or when a full moon looms above; in the figures kneeled in the light of the street lamps and the shapes that lurk beyond their reach; in the graffiti that can race and dance or slowly shift upon the faces of buildings older than countries and refuse to be removed; in the timeworn temples that had the city built around them; in the druids of lawns and weeds; in the mages that carve their baseball bats with symbols of power and fill their trench coat pockets with glador brewed in basements and lifted from stores; in the bards that busk at the city crossroads and send ballads streaking across the globe in a crackle of sparks and binary; and in the warlocks both of new gods with bones of steel, veins of fire and skin a tough as concrete, and of the old gods that seep out like moss from the pavement as they refuse to be forgotten.

So as you go about your busy days, give a swift greeting to the magpies that watch and wait from the roofs and branches; pass a murmur of respect to the faerie oak that stands like an island in a sea of concrete; ignore the shapes glimpsed from the windows at night but draw the blinds and lock the doors. And always remember. That magic is not dead.


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1 year ago

Dino time

4 months ago
“”“He””” Probably Should Have Realised A Tad Earlier Tbh (dead Gods There Were So Many Signs

“”“He””” probably should have realised a tad earlier tbh (dead gods there were so many signs 😭)

Open tags for y’all

Picrew tag game!- Create yourself now vs how you looked when you were a kid

Link

I was tagged by @cutebisexualmess for this but the chain was too long so I'm restarting!

Picrew Tag Game!- Create Yourself Now Vs How You Looked When You Were A Kid

If only that little girl could see me now (she'd probably think I was cool tbh)

uhm tagging: @b3achfagz (ik you dont do tag games so u can just ignore this but i though u might find it cool) @cassiecryptic @viktheviking1 @depressedgremlinbitch @ramencat12 @inkyslimee @the-horrifying-digital-circus @patipati @cute--thing @musicalsiphonophore @tastetherainbow290 @disenchantedwarlock @bookishcatcafe and anyone else who sees this and thinks it looks cool!!

3 months ago

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

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mollyhawk - Molly Hawk
Molly Hawk

Spec evo and dinosaurs are fun

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