So Fun

peeling those sour rainbow gummy strips into long thin strings and putting them into cheap energy drink to create something im calling battery acid spaghetti will update once ive finished it

soup pride flag

red: the color of meat that is in soup (or tomato)

yellow: the color of a creamy broth or stock

green: herbs and vegetables in the soup

pink: the color of love (that you have for soup)

yellow 2: oil

My understanding of phylogenetics is definitely limited so maybe I'm the one who's been getting it wrong this entire time, but if you haven't done so already would you mind explaining the studies about falcons being part of the Australaves clade? I find a lot of people saying things like "falcons are closely related to parrots" which I feel is a bit misleading, but again I could be wrong. Thanks in advance!

Sure! Australaves is the name given to a clade containing the seriemas, falcons, parrots, and passeriform birds. This group was first discovered by genetic analyses in the mid-2000s. As one might expect, this was a very unexpected finding, because prior to this no one had considered that all of these birds might be closely related to each other. (For example, seriemas were traditionally thought to be more closely related to cranes, falcons were thought to be more closely related to hawks, passeriforms were thought to be more closely related to woodpeckers, and so on.)

However, many more genetic studies on birds have been done since then by different research teams sampling different types of genes, vastly greater amounts of genetic data, and larger numbers of bird species, and Australaves has been consistently supported by nearly all of these. We can be pretty confident at this point that Australaves is a real clade.

Within Australaves, parrots and passeriforms are each other’s closest living relatives, and falcons are most closely related to the clade uniting both of them (which has been given the long name of Psittacopasserae). So it would not be incorrect to say that falcons are closely related to parrots, because parrots are indeed among the closest living relatives that falcons have.

However, I’ve occasionally seen people claim that parrots alone are the closest living relatives of falcons, and that is not correct. Instead, parrots and passeriforms are together the closest living relatives of falcons, and falcons are equally closely related to both (much like how a pair of siblings is equally closely related to their first cousin, instead of the cousin being more closely related to one sibling than to the other). The group containing falcons, parrots, and passeriforms (but not seriemas) has another mouthful of a name, Eufalconimorphae!

Perfectly formed orbs.

Barn swallow … Cupola Park, Millsboro, Delaware … 7/11/21

A Siberian jay/lavskrika photographed in Jämtland, Sweden in early September.

Mercury's tail & Pleiades l Sebastian Voltmer

Two more weeks of gender!

Spot-billed toucanet (Selenidera maculirostris)