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[MetalSlimeHunt]

Rejoice, for the concept of birds ignoring their young due to the smell of humans is merely an urban legend, I presume to convince children not to mess with baby animals.

[Cruxador]

Probably in vain, mama tit will probably ignore it now because it smells of humans, but at least I tried.

Conventional wisdom holds that birds have a shit sense of smell (though there's some modern research suggesting that this is untrue at least for raptors) and in general are simple characters with only very limited ways to recognize their offspring. That's why cuckoos work.

[scriver]

Yeah but corvids are fucking op.

[Reelya]

As a biologist, I adore tits and ass.
Speaking of tits, just last week I saved an old lady's little tit. It had fallen from it's nesting, and I managed to grab it just before it would have been swallowed by my pussy. She was mad at me for hours, until I bribed her later with some catnip treats.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

this really happened. I was walking my cat and managed to spot it trying to catch a grounded baby tit which most likely had been a bit overconfident with it's flight practice. Not enough feathers yet to be able to lift off. I grabbed it, rang the doorbell of the old lady whose garden I found it in, borrowed a ladder and put it back in the nest box. Probably in vain, mama tit will probably ignore it now because it smells of humans, but at least I tried.

Apparently there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that birds will reject their own babies if humans touch them.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-birds-abandon-young-at-human-touch/
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/babybird.asp

It's yet another of those "well known facts" which has literally zero to back it up. It's probably an old wives tale concocted to stop children messing with bird's nests, but there's no factual basis for the claim.

[muldrake]

Trump: "No politician in history has been treated worse."

Of all the squalling, infantile crybaby bullshit to say, he said that to a group of military men and women.  Does this giant baby really think people who face bullets are going to weep at mean words?

Also, as with virtually everything Trump says, he's either lying, ignorant or delusional.  Just to start out our own history:

In the 1796 election, John Adams suffered a blow when the Boston Independent Chronicle alleged that during the Revolution he had publicly supported Washington while surreptitiously attempting to have the General cashiered. In truth, it was Adams’s second cousin, Sam, who had sought Washington’s scalp.

Adams’s opponent, Thomas Jefferson … was accused of being the son of a half-breed Indian and a mulatto father. Voters were warned that Jefferson’s election would result in a civil war and a national orgy of rape, incest, and adultery.

Andrew Jackson [was portrayed by his opponents] as a bloodthirsty wild man; a trigger-happy brawler; the son of a prostitute and a black man… his older brother had been sold as a slave [and] Jackson … had put to death soldiers who had offended him. Worst of all, Jackson and his wife were depicted as adulterers. Through a technical mixup, Rachael Jackson had married Andrew before her first husband divorced her. “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?” screamed the Cincinnati Gazette. Rachael succumbed to a heart attack before the couple could move into the White House, and many of Jackson’s advocates attributed her death to the calumnious campaign of 1828.

http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/08/25/history/post-perspective/tradition-dirty-politics.html

[Puzzlemaker]

Other bird species will also end up shifting their egg color in response to natural selection from cuckoos.  Of course cuckoos/cowbirds also evolve, resulting in an evolutionary arms race that ends in cool looking eggs.



https://phys.org/news/2011-04-biological-arms-birds-result-sophisticated.html

Cuckoos and other brood parasites will sometimes attack and destroy nests that rejected their eggs, putting pressure on the host birds to just raise the parasite brood and hope it doesn't kill ALL of the other chicks.  One survivor is better then none, after all.  Also, once a nest is rebuilt after being destroyed, the cuckoo will sometimes re-lay an egg in the same nest.  This is widely regarded as a Dick Move.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Weird I was just reading about brood parasites.

Some host birds have very developed very sophisticated defenses against brood parasites in places where brood parasites are common. Black-collared Barbets form teama and kill honeyguides on sight. Others will post adults around nesting areas and attack on sight. One species of Cuckoo Finch mimics the appearance of the otherwise harmless Red Bishop so host species birds just go berserk and attack both species on sight.

Birds are pretty stupid creatures, mostly too stupid to realize an extra egg in the clutch and too stupid to realize the huge hatching that killed all the other hatchings in the nest and doesn't look anything like them isn't actually their offspring. Then they work themselves to exhaustion trying to feed it..m, but its an interesting they have some kind of adaptation even if its beating up on a totally harmless species.

[redwallzyl]

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/18/528925119/roger-ailes-former-fox-news-ceo-dies-at-77

Ding dong the witch is dead.

http://www.npr.org/2017/05/18/528801807/wading-into-murky-waters-trump-trip-to-advocate-religious-unity

And Mr Trump goes to the middle east.

[Frumple]

... trump to go to the middle east, vatican. With a message of religious unity, of all things. One of the areas he managed to alienate (even if they still voted for him) some goddamn conservative american evangelists with his attitude towards the subject.

Yeah, we're fucked. Them, too. Pretty sure I've seen militant anti-theists with more piety and respect towards religion and religious mores than trump has, or at least better able to fake it. Let's hope the article and puffery coming from the administration is exaggerating about him intending to pursue that track. And by exaggerating I mean lying out their ass, and the secret service or something ready and willing to physically muzzle trump the second he starts speaking about it. Otherwise holy shit, this administration may have found the one thing we haven't overtly done to straight up piss off the middle east and non-US christian/catholic nations.

[Sheb]

Another cool fact about cuckoo is that, like all birds, it's the female who sport a Y chromosome that is transmitted matrilineally. That led to evolution of several distinct lineages of cuckoos, with eggs of different colours to adapt to parasiting various bird species.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Everyone knows Trump isn't religious, unless he can somehow draw a parallel between himself and Jesus or something.

But yeah, people voted for Trump because he doesn't give a damn about any other country besides the USA and its hardly the kind of guy to kowtow to an old foreign guy dressed like a wizard claiming to be a representative of God.

This is literally why people elected him.

[martinuzz]

Everyone knows Trump isn't religious, unless he can somehow draw a parallel between himself and Jesus or something.

What? Are you saying it's not Donald Jesus Trump?

[Rusty Shackleford]

Everyone knows Trump isn't religious, unless he can somehow draw a parallel between himself and Jesus or something.

What? Are you saying it's not Donald Jesus Trump?

Yeah, folks, I tell ya you know Jesus had a lot of political enemies. They didn't like what he was saying, but Jesus never stopped saying uh, whatever hr said, then, well you know what happened. I'm like Jesus. I believe, wholeheartedly, that Obamacare MUST be repealed, much like Jesus would have. You see the attacks on me now. Very sad."

[EnigmaticHat]

Everyone knows Trump isn't religious, unless he can somehow draw a parallel between himself and Jesus or something.

But yeah, people voted for Trump because he doesn't give a damn about any other country besides the USA and its hardly the kind of guy to kowtow to an old foreign guy dressed like a wizard claiming to be a representative of God.

This is literally why people elected him.

The majority of US Christians are protestant, as is Trump, so the Pope wouldn't get a say either way.

[martinuzz]

Someone drove their car into a crowd on Times Square, New York.
One person was killed and at least 13 injured. The perpetrator came to a halt when he bumped his car into an iron pole. He has been arrested.
NBC reports that police are not considering it to be a terrorist attack. The 26-year old driver had two prior convictions for drunk driving.

http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/auto-rijdt-in-op-voetgangers-op-time-square-new-york-wat-we-nu-weten~a4495723/