Taiwan 🇹🇼 Blue-Magpie 🦚

🇹🇼   Taiwan Blue-Magpie   🦚

Birds of the World

 Urocissa Caerulea 🐦Formosan Blue
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The Taiwan blue magpie (Urocissa caerulea), also called the Taiwan magpie, Formosan blue magpie (Chinese: 臺灣藍鵲; pinyin: Táiwān lán què), or the "long-tailed mountain lady" (Chinese: 長尾山娘; pinyin: Chángwěi shānniáng; Taiwanese Hokkien: Tn̂g-boé soaⁿ-niû), is a bird species in the crow family. It is endemic to Taiwan.

 

Distribution and habitat
The Taiwan blue magpie is endemic to Taiwan. It lives in broadleaf forests at elevations of 300–1,200 m (980–3,940 ft).
🐦
Behavior
Taiwan blue magpies are not very afraid of people. They can be found near human residences in the mountains or newly cultivated lands. They are gregarious and are usually found in groups of three to twelve. The birds often fly in a line, following each other. This is sometimes called "long-tailed formation".
Similar to other members of the crow family, they have a raucous call which is described as a high-pitched cackling chatter, kyak-kyak-kyak-kyak. Other calls include ga-kang, ga-kang, kwee-eep and gar-suee.

Taiwan Blue Magpie

Enjoyed Touching by Birders
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https://youtu.be/6OPfvsKzlrg

Relationship with humans
Taiwan blue magpie is the sacred bird of Taiwan aborigine Tsou, Thao, and Bunun peoples. The sacred bird is called Teofsi'za in Tsou, Fitfit in Thao, and Haipis (Isbukun group) / Kaipis in Bunun. In the common great flood myths of Taiwan Austronesian peoples, in Tsou, Thao, and Bunun sagas, the last surviving peoples escaped from the great flood to high mountain summits as the last refuge. The sacred bird Taiwan blue magpie sacrificed itself and helped the peoples to carry the last fire tinder from Yu Shan summit back to the peoples. (in some versions of the sagas, the sacred bird is considered to be black bulbul.
Taiwan blue magpies have attacked humans to defend their nests. Taiwan blue magpies are sometimes illegally captured by humans, but the number of cases of this seems to have decreased.
In the 2007 National Bird Voting Campaign held by the Taiwan International Birding Association, there were over 1 million votes cast from 53 countries.  The Taiwan blue magpie defeated the Mikado pheasant in the vote, but the vote was not formally accepted.
In 2017 China Airlines unveiled a Taiwan blue magpie paint scheme on an Airbus A350. The aircraft was the 100th A350 produced by Airbus.
The AIDC XAT-5 Blue Magpie advanced jet trainer is named after the Taiwan blue magpie.

Nature's Beautiful Wildlife:

Taiwan Blue Magpie
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https://youtu.be/QObu__XvscQ
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https://youtu.be/N7L0hGf5bNY
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https://youtu.be/3Sl_cQvRCRA

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🐦 🪶🦃 🦉🦆 🦜 🦤🐤 🦅🐓🕊️🦢🐣 🐥 🦚 🦤
https://youtu.be/cfMQlbXcLqY

🐦 🪶  🦃  🦉  🦆 🦜 🦤 🐤  🦅  🐓 🕊️ 🦢 🐣 🐥 🦚 🦤

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_blue_magpie

Umwelt 🌹Yoshiyuki Katayama

Umwelt

Yoshiyuki Katayama
👇 ♪ 📽 ♪ 👇

     

"Relaxing Piano Music" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Umwelt is a short film by Japanese artist Yoshiyuki Katayama that depicts an elegant series of flowers blooming in slow motion. Unlike other time-lapse videos we’ve seen in this genre, each flower is accompanied by an insect or spider that crawls across each flower at the precise moment it blooms. The timing is incredible considering the insects stay in view while the flower comes to life, there must be some sort of clever editing? Katayama also created a small website that gives a bit of information about each insect and flowering pairing. 

A vertically oriented version of Umwelt recently won 3rd prize at the 2nd Vertical Film Festival in Australia.

 

🌻 🌷 🍁 ☘💐🌻 🌺 🌿🌼 🌹 🌸 ☘🍂🌻🍃 🌷 🌼💐🌹

Watch a Garden Come to Life 

In This Absolutely Breathtaking Time-Lapse 

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Umwelt

In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, umwelt (plural: umwelten; from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal". 

The term is usually translated as "self-centered world". Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment. The term umwelt, together with companion terms Umgebung (an Umwelt as seen by another observer) and Innenwelt (the mapping of the self to the world of objects), have special relevance for cognitive philosophers, roboticists and cyberneticians, since they offer a solution to the conundrum of the infinite regress of the Cartesian Theater.  

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
• http://ktym.jpn.org
• https://www.instagram.com/katayama_yoshiyuki 
  

🌹  👇   📺   👇  🌹

🌷 🍁 ☘💐🌻 🌺 🌿🌼 🌹 🌸 ☘🍂🌻🍃 🌷 🌼 🌹 💐🌹

Umwelt is defined as "the world as it is experienced by a particular organism." It's a word often used in relation to ethology, the study of animal - and human - behavior. This short experimental film by Yoshiyuki Katayama captures the moment insects experience flourishing flowers. 

🌻 🌷 🍁 ☘💐🌻 🌺 🌿🌼 🌹 🌸 ☘🍂🌻🍃 🌷 🌼 🌹 💐🌹

Umwelt Vertical

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  Umwelt_Vertical from KATAYAMA Yoshiyuki on Vimeo.

Greta Thunberg's🌍Climate Strike🌎 Inspired Millions🌏

2 striking photos taken just over a year apart

show how

Greta Thunberg's Climate Strike Inspired Millions
by Morgan McFall-Johnsen

🌍 🌎 🌏

Left: Greta Thunberg sits outside the Swedish parliament building in order to raises awareness for climate change on August 28, 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden. 

Right: People protest during a Climate Strike march in San Francisco, California, September 20, 2019.

But those first Fridays were lonely affairs. She stationed herself outside Swedish parliament with her handwritten sign and, sometimes, a few friends.

• Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old from Sweden, started striking every Friday in August 2018 to demand climate action from world leaders.
• On Friday, millions joined her in cities worldwide in a Global Climate Strike, mostly led by other young people.
• The photos of Thunberg's lonely demonstrations last year and the millions-strong climate marches on Friday show how she's inspired young people across the globe.

In August 2018, Greta Thunberg sat outside Swedish parliament with a sign reading "school strike for climate." It was her first Friday walking out of school for climate action, and she made a weekly routine out of it.

Today her efforts inspired millions to march in the streets of cities across the world.

Thunberg will speak on Saturday at the United Nations Youth Climate Summit in New York City, then at the UN Climate Action Summit on Monday.
 On Friday, she joined the protesters she'd inspired in New York City.

"I would never have predicted or believed that this was going to happen someday. And so fast, only in 15 months," Thunberg told the AP. "I can't wait to see the official numbers come in. It will be magnificent."

Thunberg will make her voice heard again on Saturday at the United Nations Youth Climate Summit in New York City, then speak at the UN Climate Action Summit on Monday.REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio estimated 60,000 people marching through the streets of Lower Manhattan. Other estimates were as high as 250,000 people.

"We have only been born into this world, we are going to have to live with this crisis our whole lives. So will our children and grandchildren and coming generations," Thunberg told Reuters. "We are not going to accept this. We are striking because we want a future and we are going to carry on."

"I think if enough people get together and stand up for this then that can have a huge difference, to put pressure on the people in power, to actually hold them accountable and to say you need to do something now," Thunberg said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/2-photos-show-how-greta-thunbergs-climate-strike-inspired-millions-2019 

 

• Read more: 
• 12 Gen Zers who skipped school to march across New York for the Global Climate Strike share why this is the most urgent issue of their generation
• Photos show huge climate-change protests around the world, which have spread across continents as millions strike to demand action
• How 16-year-old Greta Thunberg became the face of climate-change activism
• 16-year-old Greta Thunberg is sailing 13 days across the Atlantic to speak at a climate conference in New York. Here's why she won't just dial in.

Gorilla Family Stops Traffic To Cross Road

Silverback Gorilla Stops Traffic

To Cross Road

Gorilla Family and Me

BBC Earth

This Silverback gorilla causes the road to come to a standstill

when his family needs to cross it. 

Gorilla Family and Me: 

Wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan ventures deep into the Congo to form an intimate relationship with the world's biggest gorilla. Grauer's gorillas are a beautiful yet little known giants living in the foothills of eastern Congo's Virunga volcanoes. 

Watch more videos from BBC Earth: 

• Planet Earth http://bit.ly/PlanetEarthPlaylist 
• Blue Planet http://bit.ly/BluePlanetPlaylist 
• Planet Earth II http://bit.ly/PlanetEarthIIPlaylist Planet Dinosaur http://bit.ly/PlanetDinoPlaylist 
• Check out the other two channels in our BBC Earth network: BBC Earth Unplugged: http://bit.ly/BBCEarthUnplugged 
• BBC Earth Lab: http://bit.ly/BBCEarthLabYouTubeChannel 

About BBC Earth: 

The world is an amazing place full of stories, beauty and natural wonder. Explore the official BBC Earth YouTube channel and meet the animals and wildlife of your planet. Here you'll find 50 years worth of astounding, entertaining, thought-provoking and educational natural history documentaries. Dramatic, rare and wild nature doesn't get more exciting than this. Subscribe to be the first to view new animal documentary videos. 

This is a channel from BBC Worldwide who help fund new BBC programs Service information and feedback: http://bbcworldwide.com/vod-feedback-... 

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Subscribe to BBC Earth for more amazing animal videos - http://bit.ly/BBCEarthSub 

Hummingbird’s Tongue 👅 How It Works

Hummingbird’s 👅Tongue

How It Works

By James Gorman  -  Sept. 8, 2015

Hummingbirds are great subjects for evolutionary biologists because they are so extreme. They live at a fast pace, wings a blur, tongue darting in and out of flowers at a frenetic pace, often 15 or 20 times a second.

And, according to Alejandro Rico-Guevara at the University of Connecticut: “They’re just fascinating. They are so bold.”

Dr. Rico-Guevara, who just published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B a description of how the hummingbird’s tongue works to draw up nectar, said that when working in the middle of the forest, he has often had hummingbirds approach him. “They just come to hover right in front of your face.” He said it is as if they are asking, “Why are you here?”

Dr. Rico-Guevara could have explained that he had reasons beyond his delight in the birds, which he said were everywhere when he was growing up in Colombia.

He was researching how their tongues work, with his colleagues Tai-Hsi Fan and Margaret A. Rubega, also at the university.

Scientists had studied hummingbirds for a long time, he said, but had not reached a clear understanding of how they drink nectar. In the recent work and earlier experiments with Dr. Rubega, he and his colleagues showed that the tongues, which are forked, open up in the flower to trap nectar in the tongue and to pump nectar up two grooves in the tongue.

It was once thought that capillary action, the force behind fluid rising in a narrow straw even without suction, propelled the nectar up the tongue. But high speed video of the tongues at work showed that the nectar is drawn up too fast for capillary action. The tongue is compressed until it reaches nectar. Then it springs open and that rapid action traps the nectar and it moves up the grooves. Capillary action does not play a role.

The findings could affect thinking about how flowers and hummingbirds have evolved together, since the shape of the flower, the composition of the nectar and the shape and workings of the tongue must all fit together for the system to work.

How These Hummingbirds Turned Their Beaks Into Swords

ScienceTake

In the South American tropics, where hummingbirds must compete for food, evolution has drastically reshaped their bills. They are thicker and more rigid, often with a hook on the end. In some cases, they have jagged points, like rows of teeth — all the better for fighting off rivals! 

Read the story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/sc... 

Every week, ScienceTake answers questions like how monkeys teach manners, elephants show empathy and ants imitate water. 

Tune in Tuesdays at 4 p.m. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/U8Ys7n 

More from The New York Times Video: http://nytimes.com/video

 

The Hummingbird's Tongue
How do hummingbird tongues work?

ScienceTake S1:E64

Find out in this ScienceTake video from 2015:
https://nyti.ms/2Q99c7w

Scientists at the University of Connecticut used high-speed cameras to investigate the mechanics of a hummingbird's tongue, which is forked at the end and works like a pump for retrieving nectar. Watch this 2015 episode of ScienceTake for more. 

Read the story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/sc... 

Every week, ScienceTake answers questions like how monkeys teach manners, elephants show empathy and ants imitate water. Tune in Tuesdays at 4 p.m. 

 Subscribe: http://bit.ly/U8Ys7n

 

 

 To fuel its heart and wings a hummingbird eats 4-8 times an hour. The mechanisms that enable a hummer to consume several times it body weight in nectar each day are revealed in this unforgettable study of biological engineering and intelligent design. This video is an excerpt from the feature-length documentary FLIGHT: THE GENIUS OF BIRDS. For more information contact www.go2rpi.com

 

Anyone care o explain the mechanism of action a little better? How does its tongue pull liquid into its beak?

The forked tongue opens up in the flower trapping nectar between grooves. This rapid action forces the nectar through these grooves and up the tongue into the bird's mouth.

Edit: here's an NYT article that explains it better than me.

https://external-preview.redd.it/vlUovT1QklF_AkrUBJytYhtOFrO7akjtb_j2Tq3k8l0.gif?format=mp4&s=a9e6d8dffcd43ad6414ca7e219f0d5a85c0796ed

Save Earth🙏🏻Save Nature!

Save Earth

Save Nature!

VIDEO

                  

"It's just one straw, it's just one disposable cup, it's just one plastic bag"

 - 7.4 billion people.

Song    Forgotten Dream

Artist   Di Evantile

Album  Ritual

😓💔😫💔😢😡😭💔😫🙏🏻💔🙏🏻😢💔😭😡😭😢😡

Protect Earth
Earth is Our Home - Let's Protect It

National Geographic

Humans aren't separate from nature, we're part of it. 

Let's make our planet proud. 

National Geographic Society is proud to be partnering with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for the 2016 World Conservation Congress. http://iucnworldconservationcongress.org 

➡ Subscribe: http://bit.ly/NatGeoSubscribe

😓💔😫💔😢😡😭💔😫🙏🏻💔🙏🏻😢💔😭😡😭😢😡

This Island Had Just One Tree Look at It Now

Once, This Island Had Just One Tree

Look at It Now

National Geographic

In the middle of the Atlantic, the tallest peak of a small volcanic island is covered in lush greenery, by design. 

When scientists talk about terraforming a landscape, there’s a good chance they’re talking about Mars. 

(To terraform a place is to make it earthlike—for instance, bringing in plants and animals.) 

But the first scientific experiment in terraforming actually took place starting in the 19th century.

Ascension Island was quite barren when Charles Darwin visited, and he had little good to say about the remote, rocky place. But a contemporary of Darwin’s, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, saw the island as a blank canvas, ready to serve as home to an ecosystem of his own making. 

After importing thousands of plants and animals, however, Hooker came to have second thoughts about the undertaking, which wound up threatening the island’s sparse native vegetation. Now, conservationists are working to save Ascension’s few endemic plants from extinction.

• Read more in "Mysterious sand Experiment Could Help Us Colonize Other Planets" https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/ascension-island-terraformed-biology-evolution-conservation

• Once, This Island Had Just One Tree—Look at It Now | National Geographic https://youtu.be/TZPrk9IZ3Jw

Digital Jelly Fish

Earth Anthem 🌍 Multilanguage

Earth Anthem

🌎🌍🌏 

Multilanguage

 

Earth Anthem written and produced by poet-diplomat Abhay K. (www.abhayk.com) is in 8 world languages including 6 official UN languages viz. Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish as well as Hindi & Nepali. 

Singer: Shreya Sotang, 

Music: Sapan Ghimire
UNESCO has hailed the idea of an official Earth Anthem proposed by Abhay K. as a creative and inspiring thought that would contribute bringing the world together.

👇  🖥️  👇

Earth Anthem (Multilingual)
by Abhay K.

Our cosmic oasis, cosmic blue pearl
The most beautiful planet in the universe
Our cosmic oasis, cosmic blue pearl
All the continents and the oceans of the world
United we stand as flora and fauna
United we stand as species of one earth
🌎 🌍 🌏
Black, brown, white, different colours
Inshan hain ham, dharati hamara ghar   (Hindi)
Hami manav houn, yo sansar hamro ghar   (Nepali)
Mi lyudi, zemlaya nash dom   (Russian)
Leken kulena bashiran wal arda mawtinena   (Arabic)
🌎 🌍 🌏
Our cosmic oasis, cosmic blue pearl
The most beautiful planet in the universe
Our cosmic oasis, cosmic blue pearl
All the people and the nations of the world
All for one, one for all, all for one, one for all
United we unfurl the blue marble flag
Black, brown, white, different colours
🌎 🌍 🌏
Nous sommes des humains, la terre est notre maison (French)
Somos humanos, la tierra es nuestra casa (Spanish)
Wǒmen shì zénlèi, dìshiye shì wǒmen dechiā (Chinese)
We are humans, the earth is our home. (English)

🌎 🌍 🌏

More at www.earthanthem.net

Earth Anthem penned by poet-diplomat Abhay K. sung by Kavita Krishnamurti and Bindu Subramaniam, music composed by Dr. L. Subramanian to celebrate golden jubilee of Earth Day.

  👇 ❤️  👇

  https://youtu.be/Y3TkbbzYqsM?si=k5KRvFKN5lkbOy_l

  

Earth Anthem
Jeff Berkeley
Earth Anthem · The Lifesmith Group · Jeff Berkeley

From the mountains of Everest to the hills of Jerusalem
We have come in the name of peace for all and we call Earth our home.

👇  🖥️  👇

We come from the land of sun and snow
Where the wind blows the trees and the wheat fields grow
From our Gods to our souls our honor rings true
We vow justice and truth for me and you.

We have seen the cases and run the races
For growth is the understanding of peace
In galaxy's spaces our memory traces
Imperial Rome and classical Greece.

From the east come our numbers, strong and lean 
From the west comes the US, society's dream 
From European roots come most of our minds 
From the native south comes survival's shrines.

The world ocean abounds with life and resources 
Our animals so great, the dogs, cattle and horses 
Our vines pour over the wine of our days 
The streams and rivers are nature's waterways.

By the power invested in the people of Earth
We entreat your welcome for wisdom and mirth 
Our message is peace for all to see 
From sea to shining sea.

Earth Anthem
Written, produced and directed
By Poet Abhay K 
English