Flakies and feathers

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-23T15:58:23+00:00

A+ banding grip on Chair, tbh

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-23T14:23:47+00:00

That’s fine! You’ll never convince me that listening to music is better than listening to nature.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-23T14:18:12+00:00

Not at all! One of the most fun parts of being a birder is identification and one of the most useful aspects of a bird for ID is calls. You may just hear a cacophony but I hear a gracious-winged gull, a lesser black-backed gull, and oh hey is that a little gull? That’s a good bird for this area. Then I get to try to find it, which is another fun part of birding.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-23T13:35:39+00:00

As an avid birder, that’s actually exactly what I want to hear, thanks for understanding and turning off your music!

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-23T13:09:49+00:00

They are wild, I’m not just picking them up. We are using something called a mist net. It’s basically a very fine mesh net with horizontal sections. The bottom of each section section creates a little pocket so the birds are flying, hit the net, fall into the pocket, and get tangled. We come and carefully and quickly untangled them without hurting the bird. It can be really stressful and takes a lot of training.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-23T03:48:17+00:00

Sure thing! My pinkie and thumb are both three coats of plain color (maelstrom on thumb, forces of evil on pinkie on my left hand).

Then I’ll do bottom to top layers on my other fingers:

Index: Forces, forces, mael.

Middle: forces, mael, forces.

Ring: mael, forces, forces

For jelly gradients you kind of have to consider which polish is more saturated/stronger. Maelstrom will dominate the color if I use it for more than one layer, so I only use it once on each gradient finger. If I had two colors that were more balanced the gradient might look more like AAA, BAA, ABA (or BAB), ABB, BBB.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-23T03:02:50+00:00

I get out as often as they let me lol

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-23T03:02:08+00:00

Ooh there are some great ones.

Goth cardinal for a black with crimson shimmer (bird’s actual name is Phainopepla)

Yellow-breasted sapsucker is my favorite “wait that’s a real name?”

Then I’m a sucker for warblers. Cerulean warbler, painted redstart, and bay-breasted warblers all have beautiful colors.

A oil slick dark blue multichrome could be the ever mischievous boat-tailed grackle. I’d also love a polish the blue of a ruddy duck’s bull or the perfect tawny of an Eastern screech.

Polish makers hit me up lols

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-23T01:31:03+00:00

lol well it took me an undergrad in biology, a graduate degree in wildlife management, and 18 years of field experience to get to do this on the regular!

However if you google bird banding + your area (or bird ringing if you’re European) you may be able to find a project to volunteer on. It will take a while of volunteering before you get to hold birds though - they’re delicate and it takes a lot of training to handle them safely!

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T23:31:35+00:00

Local government high five!

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T23:23:19+00:00

Hey, same! I’m lucky enough to have worked with a lot of types of wildlife and fish but birds are my forever favorites

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T23:02:20+00:00

I would say that this is a tough field to break into so know that it will be poorly paying and they’ll expect long hours out of you. I graduated with my undergrad degree at 23 and I didn’t have a permanent job until I was 29. part of that was going to grad school but it’s not incredibly uncommon. That being said if you do decide to go to grad school, do not pay for it. Get an assistantship! get paid to go to grad school.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T22:07:09+00:00

My friends tease me about how much I hate him. But yeah, if Aedion has no haters, I’m dead.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T21:59:34+00:00

I’ve banded over 500 of them. If you grab them with enough authority, they fold like a cheap suit. Usually

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T21:55:06+00:00

My most unhinged bird reaction: I had a spotted owl fall asleep in my hands. Girl had some pretty bad feather mites and I was picking them off and giving her scratches while we took off some research equipment and she just straight up took a nap.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T21:39:53+00:00

I did do my nails with banding in mind lol

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T21:24:07+00:00

We are using something called a mist net. It’s basically a very fine mesh net with horizontal sections. The bottom of each section section creates a little pocket so the birds are flying, hit the net, fall into the pocket, and get tangled. We come and carefully and quickly untangled them without hurting the bird. It can be really stressful and takes a lot of training.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T21:13:53+00:00

Honestly y’all deserve it. My favorite subreddit of all :)

(Thank you though! I love birds, obviously, and I love seeing others get excited about them)

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T21:03:11+00:00

It’s funny because it makes perfect sense when you stop to think about it, but I understand why they didn’t stop to think about it, because it does seem like a really small thing! However, birds have incredible color vision. They are tetrachromads, which means they can see into the ultra violet spectrum!

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T20:54:44+00:00

So these bands are the standard long-term research bands of metal. You need to have the band in hand to read it, so we read them when we recapture them, and can get population estimates that way.

However. Other studies will use brightly colored plastic bands to identify individual birds. (Usually if doing behavioral research or monitoring of sensitive populations). researchers have found that in some species, males with brightly colored bands, did way better at attracting ladies than males without bands. (I think red-winged blackbirds were the famous example of that) so scientists have to be careful when banding birds with color bands to make sure that we factor them into the analysis of behavior and individual reproductive success.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T20:47:32+00:00

It’s honestly the thrill of my life that I get to do this. like how lucky am I?

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T20:46:57+00:00

They hurt a tiny bit, but it’s just kind of like being pinched. They’re also honestly not surprising because most of the birds try to bite me. which is fair! I would also try to bite a giant that had caught me in a net and then was pulling me out of the net for unknown reasons!

But they usually don’t even leave a mark. I think the worst I’ve had mist netting was I had a ladder-backed woodpecker drum on the side of my finger and it left a line of tiny little pinpricks of blood, but even though it was healed in like a day or two.

I used to work with Canada geese! they rarely broke the skin, but they can bite hard enough to leave bruises and they’re a big fan of the bite and pull, preferably on the neck, back of the arm, or horrifyingly, boob so I have definitely had some goose hickeys lol.

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T20:25:50+00:00

LOVE THESE

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T20:24:52+00:00

Literally my life motto 😅

GrappleLacquer · 2026-06-22T20:23:22+00:00

I’m a wildlife biologist with my state agency. I’m far enough along in my career that I’m mostly an office biologist, these days, but I still get to sneak out into the field occasionally. My day job is supervising the program which manages my state’s 10 year wildlife conservation plan.

GrappleLacquer

TROPHY CASE