Lemmy Today

A great horned owl chick perches on the trans-Alaska pipeline near Wiseman. (Photo by Ned Rozell)

By Ned Rozell | Alaska Science Published: April 11, 2025

Reader Todd Mackinaw recently admired how the great horned owl can thrive from the Brooks Range in Alaska all the way to Uruguay in South America.

The knee-high owl, known for its “plumicorns” — tufts above its ears that resemble horns — haunts every forested bit of Alaska.

Right about now, in early April, many female great horned owls are sitting on nests they have borrowed from other large birds — no owls build their own nest) Or they are warming eggs atop witches’ brooms — dense tangles of spruce branches caused by a fungus.

A female great horned owl sits on eggs on part of the chapel building at Pilgrim Hot Springs near Nome. (Photo by Ned Rozell)

One reason great horned owls may range so far is that they will eat anything they can grab. A few years ago, a teenage neighbor of ours shoved a great horned owl off his 7-pound dog in the driveway. The dog recovered with just a puncture wound to its neck.

Madison McConnell, as a University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student, conducted one of the few studies of great horned owls in Alaska on the northern edge of their range near Wiseman. She wrote in her 2019 master’s thesis that the reproductive success of great horned owls was directly proportional to the amount of snowshoe hares in their diets. She also detected 17 other types of prey, including dragonflies, beetles, small fish and frogs.

Biologists have listed more than 500 prey species of great horned owls throughout North and South America. These include the most common meals — voles and mice — as well as ducks, Brazilian free-tailed bats and striped skunks that perfume the feathers of one of the few birds that will mess with them.

The talons of a great horned owl — this one killed by a car on the Steese Highway — have more crushing power than a human hand. (Photo by Ned Rozell)

A great horned owl’s talons have more crushing power than the strongest human hand. Its eyes are just slightly smaller than yours. Great horned owls in Alaska and Yukon are larger than most; those living in California and Texas seem to be smallest in the U.S.

Like other owls, great horneds cough up felty pills that contain the bones, fur and other parts of their meals. Scientists and schoolkids pick those pellets apart to see what owls have eaten.

A lack of pellets beneath owl nests puzzled McConnell while she did her field work in the Brooks Range.

That inspired her to attach a trail camera to the trunk of a tree beneath a great horned owl nest to see what was going on. When she later looked at motion-triggered photos, McConnell saw that snowshoe hares were eating the owl pellets.

Hares might have been supplementing their winter diets with the nutrition from bone, feather, fur and carbohydrate residues.

“Owl pellets may be a significant nutritional supplement for hares and squirrels in the boreal forest,” McConnell wrote. Biologists have also documented hares eating soil at mineral licks in the Wiseman area.

But risk accompanies that reward. A series of McConnell’s photos from a trail-camera showed an owl flying to the ground right beneath its nest. The owl soon returned with a hare’s severed head in its bill.

A great horned owl perches on a spruce tree at midnight north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. (Photo by Ned Rozell)

The former prime minister’s ‘free speech media network’ will be unveiled soon, she announces at a cryptocurrency conference in Bedford

From Barn Owl Trust

Hello ladies and gentlemen as a brand new user (installed yesterday on new computer) of Linux in general and Bazzite specifically. I had a bootable USB I was going to use for a different distro before I decided on using Bazzite with another USB.

I decided to use the first one to move my meme collection to the new computer but when I deleted the partition and reallocated it with the highlighted option (the one that is not ms-dos I can not remember the specific name) the drive now seems to have disappeared. When I plug it in now it does not auto detect anything and for the life of me I can not find any drives through Dolphin.

If anyone can tell me how I fucked it up and/or how to find it/ fix it I would be grateful. I can always do it in Windows since I have to set up the old one to access the memes anyway but I would like to know how to do it here for the future. Thanks in advance.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/funny by /u/No_Bus_9094 on 2025-04-18 18:30:20+00:00.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/funny by /u/MaxQ50 on 2025-04-18 17:49:27+00:00.

"I don't think the company wants us to be outwardly political. I don't think, and I do feel there is probably different rules for different people. I don't talk about politics with Triple H, Paul Heyman, Roxanne Perez. It's 24/7 wrestling. I think it's pretty obvious what my 'politics' are. I've never understood Democratic or Republican glazing President. [The] President should just do his job. If you're wearing hats and shirts promoting the President and all that stuff, and we have very much seen recently all these people who have voted against their best interests because they thought this President was just going to do bad stupid shit to the people they don't like. I can sort of draw a line in the sand and say when Elon Musk is throwing Zieg Heil up and the podium, and I see people make excuses for that, nope. We saw what you did. Don't gaslight me, I'm not as fucking stupid as you are. I know what you did so I know what you are. Now I know where you stand, and this is where I stand.

"It's a strange, ugly world out there. The only thing I can do is be true to myself and implement and be a voice for myself and my family and my community, and then the world. I don't know what people want from us as entertainers. I'm just supposed to quit my job because somebody on Twitter says WWE is a 'MAGA company?' Okay. You're on Lord Elon Musk's fucking Twitter saying stupid shit. Shut the fuck up. What have you done? I've done a lot, I just don't broadcast it. I put my money where my mouth is, and the money I make goes to helping impoverished people. I don't need to write my name in on a fuckign GoFundMe to make me feel better about the shity person I am. I will always move as myself. Sometimes I can crash like water and sometimes I can be still."

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/funny by /u/TheCarrot_v2 on 2025-04-18 17:05:21+00:00.

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Passend zu Ostern geht es heute um Eier. Genauer gesagt, eine Pandemie aus Eiern. Aber eben ganz anders als das, was wir bei Corona gesehen haben. Weltweit sind viele Menschen krank geworden, aber sie haben sich nicht gegenseitig angesteckt. Der Erreger hat sich unter Hühnern verbreitet.

Die Übeltäter waren Salmonellen, und zwar eine ganz besondere Linie dieser Bakterien: Salmonella enterica Serovar Enteritidis. Ein Serovar ist eine Variante der Bakterienart, eine Abstammungslinie mit typischen Eigenschaften.
Salmonellen gab es schon vorher in Eiern. Doch bis in die 1970er Jahre sind Menschen vor allem durch die Art Salmonella Typhimurium krank geworden. In den späten 1970er Jahren tauchte Salmonella Enteritidis fast gleichzeitig in Nordamerika, Südamerika und Europa auf. Besonders in Europa wurden immer mehr Menschen krank. In den späten 1980ern hatte sich der Keim auch in den Geflügelindustrien Afrikas und Asiens verbreitet und machte dort Menschen krank. Es dauerte bis in die ersten Jahre des 21. Jahrhunderts, bis sich die Lage beruhigte.

[...] Denn die Salmonellen weltweit sind so eng miteinander verwandt, dass sie einen gemeinsamen Ursprung gehabt haben müssen. Also ganz ähnlich wie die Corona-Pandemie. Aber eben auch wieder ganz anders. Denn die Salmonellen haben sich nicht selbst weltweit verbreitet – die Bakterien sind wahrscheinlich einfach mit dem zentral produzierten Zuchtgeflügel in alle Ecken der Welt verfrachtet worden.

Den Lehren aus dieser ungewöhnlichen Pandemie verdanken wir es, dass Eier heute ein extrem sicheres Lebensmittel sind. Denn nach der großen Seuche wurden die Biosicherheits-Vorschriften verschärft, es gibt regelmäßige Kontrollen, und außerdem werden Hühner in Europa heutzutage gegen Salmonellen geimpft.

I just love todays and I doubt much license was taken in making it. I think this is one reason I just jive with obbie. This wierd thought paths float through my head regularly.

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cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/21085728

CHP İstanbul'un yaptığı yürüyüş çağrısı. Burayı da aktif olarak kullanırsak güzel olur, bu postu gören varsa lütfen yorum yazsın.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28399566

The US will abandon trying to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal within days unless there are clear signs a truce can be reached, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has warned.

"We're not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end," Rubio said, adding that the US had "other priorities to focus on".

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and has placed a number of conditions on any potential ceasefire.

Despite the Trump administration's initial confidence that it could secure a deal quickly, attempts to reach a full ceasefire have yet to materialise, with Washington blaming both sides.