beastlyart:

fairy-wren:

violet-backed starling

(photo via lynxeds)

These things don’t even look real, I have to Google them every time I see them pop up on my dash just to remind myself that oh, yeah, nature.

… NICOLE NICOLE. I JUST FIGURED OUT MY NEXT ANGEL CHARACTER. It’s gonna be great.

beastlyart:

sandrock:

These are pretty good references for closed, lifted wings. See how fucking arm-like they are?

Have some shots of my second favorite owl, the Southern White Faced Owl.

pictures most definitely not mine bye

Rebloggin’ for angel reference, and also because the guy on the left kills me. “How YOU doin?”

umzoology:

Sometimes when you’re looking for something else in the museum, you’ll come across something a little weird, like a drawer full of bird wings. 

These actually would have come in handy the other day when our curator Dave headed over to the anthropological museum collections across campus to assist them in identifying some fur and feathers that had been used to decorate various headdresses and costumes.  It can be difficult to see the variability in feather colors from birds preserved as study skins, because as you can see here many of them have incandescent secondary feathers, which would typically be folded in on a study skin.  The Burke Museum at the University of Washington has an extensive ornithological collection, including a huge number of these types of preserved wings.  Pretty neat! 

ifightformyfriends:

backyardappreciationsociety:

This is the New Zealand falcon or karearea (Falco novaeseelandiae). Technically speaking, this bird wasn’t in my backyard although I once saw a pair riding a thermal updraft above my house. I took these photos at Wingspan National Bird of Prey Centre (Rotorua) a rehab and breeding facility for New Zealand raptors (birds of prey) including moreporks (Ninox novaeseelandiae) and harrier hawks (Circus approximans). 

Oh my god it’s so beautiful

headlikeanorange:

A red-tailed hawk (Untamed Americas - NGC)

umzoology:

Historical Collections of the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum 

I’ve determined Friday’s Freak of the Week was a three-way tie with athankyou’s guess as the cervical vertebrae of a whale, somuchscience’s deduction that it was some type of cetacean (not a minke, however), and a valiant effort on pingaspie’s part to narrow it down to the same.  How rude of me to publish a FotW without I myself even knowing the true answer!  Dave said it’s from some type of cetacean, most likely a dolphin, but was unaware of its origins.  In my defense, it’s not as though we have a lot of whales in Montana and our comparative collection representing that order is quite small.  So, congratulations! and my apologies for not giving a solid answer; forgive me?! 

Our latest exhibit highlighting the historical collections of our museum opened last Thursday on the first floor of our building, Health Sciences.  We put in a lot of work over the last three months to get this together, but probably would have completed it much sooner if we had an adequate budget (and if I wasn’t the only fulltime employee) — museum exhibits are incredibly difficult!  The purple frames around the photographs were all cut by hand, as well as the labels (it’s heavy mat board); we had to make photocopies of original labels, put UV-protective strips on the lights — and on top of that find a way to hang and display everything (the wall is thin carpet-like fabric covering basically concrete).  That doesn’t even include the time to research the items and write cohesive descriptions for everything!  I’m extremely proud of the way it turned out, and will be photographing individual aspects of this exhibit over the next coming weeks in order to go into further discussion about these very significant items and those unique individuals which collected them. 

If you exclude the cost of reproducing the original historical photographs (courtesy of the Archives at the Mike and Maureen Mansfield Library, and cost about $135 [that was a big ‘oops’ on my part — we were not anticipating that high cost and if we could we would probably do it differently next time], the entire exhibit was put together with about $30.   It took a lot of extra time, but we did it!  

safria:

raging-raichel:

designcloud:

Birds by Adam S. Doyle

FUCK ME WHO’S READY FOR SOME BIRDS?

I’M READY FOR SOME BIRDS

GORGEOUS BIRDS

cries for the beauty of these gorgeous birds

fat-birds:

Tawny Owl Bathing.

anatomicalart:

wannabeanimator:

lizwuzthere:

pixiepunch:

oooo very very interesting.

rrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRREFERENCE

This is one of the best design lessons you can ever learn. Straights vs. curves.

Creating a uniqueness in style. Perfect for an illustration student to look at.

fyeah-seacreatures:

Peruvian Pelican Status: Classified as Near Threatened (NT) on the IUCN Red List.

:C