This site is a great reminder that almost everyone visiting Hacker News has a set of skills which can be put to beneficial use for causes you care about - this is a small, simple, cheap site (and I mean that in a good way!) that attracts attention, awareness, and donations to something the author cares about. It’s easy for us, but it’s magic for most people. Don’t let your tech industry imposter syndrome fool you - we can do valuable things to forward causes we care about.
Also, it’s adorable!
In this case it's more like low-cost high-delight which does sound a bit better than "cheap thrills" ;)
The owls do seem to convey a sense of communal grumpiness, expressed individually :)
Not unlike HN at tines . . .
Anyone who's worked on random enterprise CRUD REST apps earlier in their career (myself included) knows the pain of wishing that you were doing something a little more helpful or positive for humanity.
*Owl Web
Owl Rights Reserved (at the footer)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22superb+owl%22&ia=images&iax=ima...
I guess English needs different words for the German "Günstig" and "Billig". They both translate to cheap, but "Günstig" means something like cost-effective/affordable (but I guess not quite?), and is positive, while "Billig" is strictly negative.
"Affordable" is the most frequent replacement. There's also "inexpensive".
That shelter was especially interesting because it's near the nesting grounds of marine birds that are relatively rare in France or even Europe overall. Cargo ships in the English channel illegally dump oil waste all the time, and the oiled marine birds just float helplessly to the beach, still alive. People pick them up and bring them to the shelter where we literally hand-wash them with soap and put them in a bird drying station. The numbers could get overwhelming and we would have to make "bird washing assembly lines" on occasion.
It's a whole discipline with specialized equipment, passed-down knowledge and passionate people!
The H412 comes from sodium laureth sulfate (SLES) which is contained (in large amounts, like 20 to 70% by weight) in practically every kind of liquid soapy detergent, shampoo, liquid hand soap and what not. The only reason you know of that one product is that they seem to sell to professionals as well, which is why they need a material safety data sheet. Your shampoo doesn't need that, so you just don't know that it is just as harmful.
Edit: Dawn seems to contain it as well, look for CAS# 68585-34-2: https://msdsdigital.com/system/files/Dawn_Professional_Dish_... The missing H- and S-numbers in that datasheet come from the differing standards and maybe the different concentrations.
The real takeaway is that concentration matters a lot: one person washing up for the morning won't kill a pond, but a hundred people or prolonged exposition will.
https://www.acs.org/molecule-of-the-week/archive/s/sodium-la...
Likewise toilet duck toilet cleaner is just a brand name. You use it for cleaning duck toilets not ducks themselves. And don't get me started on duck tape. One honest mistake and it's a lifetime ban from the RSPB.
An elderly lady come out to see what the fuss was about, saw the bird, went back inside and then reappeared holding a block of polystyrene foam. She marched up to the bird, which very soon after found itself with a lump of foam on the end of its beak. That gave others the opportunity to wrap it in a blanket (bit big for a towel) and take it to the vet.
Those old ladies are tough!
That in itself is something that AI can leverage, maybe not better-than-average, but way more often, so people have to be on their toes a lot more too. Whether it's images or not.
Interestingly, with images like this they are highly curated for cuteness, clarity, and composition. If nothing else because there are so many photos taken of each owl during the rescue process, across a large number of photo opportunities. So there is often quite a huge variety of material from which to choose one outstanding example for each owl.
This would then make an optimized training set if you wanted to generate realistic facsimiles digitally later on.
When you do the math though, "who" needs a digital facsimile when the vast majority of actual real-world material is far in excess and not being used at all?
For example, the website creator doesn't seem to be looking for profit, nor did they add much oin terms of personal info that would point to him looking for internet clout.
The FAQ page comes across as genuine and, as another commenter put it, whimsical.
It's also all self hosted, and on a unique domain, while mass-content-farmera prefer prefer the zombified audiences of Tiktok and Facebook.
All those signals combine into a high probability of everything on the site being genuine.
In this website's case, I trust the author did enough due diligence to ensure to the best of his abilities that no AI pictures end up on his site. Looking at the submission page (0) he takes submissions by email, and requests the "name of the wildlife sanctuary and the photographer (if known)" which signals he isn't just putting random pictures from the internet.
Text forgeties existed wver since words were written down, and Text has existed for millennia. We had to deal with possible lies and forgeries the entire time.
Photo and Video are very recent inventions, so it was about time they got the same forgery treatment. Now we will have to rely on the same signals of trust as we had before.
(Nylon stockings are commonly used when transporting a wild bird for an hour or two).
She had to constantly do this as they fledged, since they couldn't get back up to the platform where the nest was. In the wild, the parents would continue to feed the young after they left the nest but before they could fly, but that wasn't practical for her to do.
The process of raising raptors from eggs is called "hacking", so it's entirely appropriate for this site. Normally done on hawks, this project showed it would work with eagles too.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hack#dictionary-e...
I must correct you on hacking, though. This process starts with just-fledged raptors, already grown to full size, fully feathered, but raised in closed quarters. They are put in a shelter surrounded by plenty of space for flying where they can see the outdoors, and they are fed daily for a few days to acclimate. Then the shelter is opened and they're allowed to explore. Food continues to be provided daily. The day that one of the birds doesn't come back for its daily feeding indicates it has caught something on its own, and is ready to be recaptured and trained as a falconry bird.
This process allows the birds to learn flying and hunting as if they were wild raptors. It reduces certain negative behaviors you get in human-imprinted birds, and gives them "street smarts" i.e. recognizing and avoiding other predators. These days of course we put telemetry tags on them so they're easy to locate and recover.
As metaphor it would be training to deal with the wide wild world, which HN has a bit of too.
Back in the day of this eagle effort, some four decades ago, she had to track them by eye in the swamps of Montezuma Wildlife Refuge and wade out to retrieve them. Not fun, but hey that's what grad students are for.
Her book: https://www.amazon.com/Return-Sky-Surprising-Eaglets-Restore...
The last effort to reintroduce bald eagles in the US was wound down in Tennessee in 2003. Today they're everywhere and are off the endangered species list. I see them quite often when out birding in the Finger Lakes of New York.
In the Bay Area where I normally live we've had bald eagles nesting in at least 2 locations -- Crystal Springs reservoir, and next to a middle school in Milpitas, which is rather surprising considering how suburban Milpitas is.
(If you ever have to relocate a bat, don't just leave them on the ground, they can't take off from there and will almost certainly die. Put them in a tree or somewhere higher up)
> 2022-2025 Owl Rights Reserved
And since owls are pretty much just the bird versions of cats, it's fitting.
How to Give A Cat a Pill: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC372253/
poundIAmBright
Although in this case it's technically neck-and-neck :)
Owls are like the cats of the bird world. It's too bad they don't get to talk. I think they'd have a lot to talk about... night time hunting, the size of mice and other rodentia, hairballs/pellets...
https://owlsintowels.org/gallery/
Finishes with:
"That's owl the posts"
Yes, this is the internet/web I needed today.
Glue traps are used to catch mice and rats. The owl sees its prey struggling in the trap, and tries to eat it.
Many birds of prey die due to eating poisoned rats and mice. Most famously, Flaco, who escaped from the Central Park zoo and entertained New Yorkers for months before eating a poisoned rat.
Ok ok, you got me! Delightful!
Which is a roundabout way of saying: I love that this is a website.
There are some very effective and cheap solutions if you have a window birds are hitting. Wavy lines on the window with a bar of soap work well. Even better are strings hanging in vertical lines outside the window. Believe it or not, your brain gets used to these and you stop noticing them very quickly. They cut down on bird fatalities a TON.
Example: https://www.birdsavers.com/
josh-sematic•8mo ago
Edit: to be clear, this site is connected with an organization and probably exists to help promote it, but it still gives that “look, this is cool!” passion to me.
lolinder•8mo ago
https://owlsintowels.org/support/donate/
josh-sematic•8mo ago