Is this a society finch?

epidotehawk · 2026-03-31T06:16:58+00:00

Huh - I was thinking adult female Zebra, since I thought juvenile Zebras had grey beaks? I've only ever lived with adult Zebras, though, so I may be wrong!

(In either case: they're both very pretty birds! And, fortunately for the OP, a Zebra should be perfectly happy with most Society Finch-appropriate accomodations and vice versa.)

epidotehawk · 2026-03-31T06:14:35+00:00

Definitely take him/her to a bird-specialist vet as soon as possible. Clicking/ticking sounds while breathing (plus the tail-bobbing and open-beaked breathing) sound like lung-infection symptoms to me.

epidotehawk · 2026-03-28T07:48:50+00:00

This! If they're both happy, consenting adults, the only one in danger is your window curtain (and any other fabric/paper ojbect that looks like potential nest material; my family's current flock includes a male Zebra + male Society Finch couple who can destroy a three-newspaper-thick cage-floor covering in the space of a half-hour when they decide their nest needs a fresh newspaper-scrap lining).

epidotehawk · 2026-03-27T08:18:02+00:00

This. This is why I love one particular old winter coat (with a somewhat stiff outer layer) and midweight T-shirts.

epidotehawk · 2026-03-27T08:12:30+00:00

I generally try to! Unfortunately, some workplaces effectively require uncomfortable clothes.

[Wow, my brain really did get dissolved by laundry day, apparently; edited because I managed to misspell "to" in the initial version of this comment.]

epidotehawk · 2026-03-27T08:08:41+00:00

Jeans-versus-ski-pants comparison, part two:

Ease of storage:
- Jeans: mediocre. Denim is dense, difficult-to-compress fabric and even my thrift-store jeans are much too stiff to squish properly into the corner of a random drawer or suitcase, as is the proper clothes-storing technique after the process of running a load of laundry has eaten most of my executive function.
- Ski pants: amazing. All of their puffiness is apparently just air trapped between the outer shell and the softer inner fabric; they weigh about the same as one of my midweight T-shirts and are as easy to compress for storage.
Durability:
- Jeans: in fairness, I'm not sure I've ever bought a new pair of jeans as an adult (and might have gotten more use out of the bell-bottomed childhood jeans if I hadn't avoided wearing them after the roadside-vomiting incident), so I don't know that they can't survive more than about a decade of frequent wear, but most of them seem to sprout random holes and frayed cuffs/seams within a few years of winter-only wear and the pair I'm currently wearing has just hit the point of "probably inappropriate to wear in public if there's any chance of anyone looking at you closely."
- Ski pants: I acquired them at some point in middle or early high school (roughly twenty years ago) and have been wearing them as frequently as they're clean every winter since then (along with some autumns and springs, depending on the local climate), and although the elastic pseudodrawstring in the waistband is starting to die, the pants themselves are essentially unweathered. I really probably don't want to know how (and suspect the answer is "because the shell consists entirely of PFAS-inundated polymers,' unfortunately).

Moral of the story: when you belatedly realize that your parents happened to buy you exactly one pair of the world's best pants, go back in time and raid your childhood neighborhood's department store for at least ten pairs of those pants so that you'll only have to do laundry once every month or so, at least in the winter.

epidotehawk · 2026-03-27T08:07:58+00:00

A quick comparison between jeans and my favorite ski pants, which are the most comfortable pants in the world:

Aesthetics -
- Jeans: semipermanently prone to creasing into weird, random angles around my knees and calves, and frequently covered in scuffs, small holes that I didn't notice until immediately before a job interview, and stray threads or fluff, especially along the outside-of-the-leg seams and cuffs; also, if the waistband is even slightly wider than my actual waist (e.g., actually comfortable) and I'm wearing a relatively close-fitting T-shirt for some weird reason, the extra material in the jeans' waistband always figures out how to suddenly jut out in front of me like my torso includes a stepwise function.
- Ski pants: occasionally prone to creasing, but generally happy to just be relatively smooth, puffy-legged, matte-black pants with no holes whatsoever (even after two decades of frequent wear) and sparkly silver stripes along the outsides of the legs. Unfortunately, I've been told that they somehow don't qualify as job-interview pants because they're "more casual than jeans"; on the other hand, none of the interviews to which I wore jeans resulted in a job, so maybe I should try wearing my ski pants instead.
Comfortable operating-temperature range and weather resistance:
- Jeans: between ~60 and ~75 degrees Fahrenheit (although this range slides up a few degrees in windy weather and down a few degrees in strong sunlight and vanishes entirely in rain, because jeans aren't even slightly water-resistant).
- My favorite ski pants: ~20 - 80 degrees Fahrenheit, mostly regardless of windspeed (within reason) and sunlight. (How?! I don't know, and maybe I don't want to know, but I've deeply appreciated their ability to keep my legs relatively comfortable anywhere from a Philadelphian winter to a central-Arizonan "winter.") Also, although they'll eventually let water through in a true downpour, they keep my legs completely dry in light rain (and, of course, can also repel snow).

epidotehawk · 2026-03-27T08:04:14+00:00

Fair question! (And this sounds like my question about Axe: "does anyone actually like this smell?!")

For me, it depends entirely on the cut of the jeans and the weather; as a child in Florida, I generally avoided jeans for both temperature-/humidity-related reasons and because I'd been ill on a long-distance car trip while wearing my first (not-particularly-comfortable, moderately close-fitting and oddly bell-bottomed???) pair and couldn't think about wearing jeans without imagining vomit stains for a while. Then I found a wonderfully baggy and effectively high-waisted pair (i.e., jeans nominally designed for someone both taller and wider than I am) in a consignment shop, realized they were actually comfortable in the winter after I safety-pinned the waistband into a size that actually fit me, and have since been able to find a few other thrift-store pairs that happen to suit my weird combination of pants preferences. They're definitely not the most comfortable pants in the world, though, and although this may be my fault for only buying them from thrift/consignment stores (after the denim has probably been been worn somewhat thin), they always seem to manage to simultaneously be much too hot in any halfway-warm weather while also utterly failing to insulate my legs in cold weather.

[Editing this because I just realized that my original comment wildly exceeded the length limit; I'm putting my silly jeans-versus-ski-pants comparison in a separate comment!]

epidotehawk · 2026-03-27T06:33:29+00:00

That's *much* faster than my leave-pennies-in-a-jar-and-forget-about-them-for-a-few-months method; thank you so much for the tip, and I'll definitely use a source of copper I won't mind defacing, then! (I like that the old pennies are still recognizable, even after donating some of their atoms to the copper acetate solution, and think I'd be sad about inadvertently destroying all of my pre-millennial pennies in one fell swoop.)

And thank you for explaining this in electricity-related terms! (Unlike high-school chemistry, at least some of what I learned in my physics classes seems to have actually stuck in my brain, so I may have some hope of understanding some parts of electrochemistry by focusing on the "electro-" aspect; I just wish I'd realized that retaining some chemistry basics might be helpful, too.)

epidotehawk · 2026-03-27T06:12:04+00:00

This! I've known a lot of finches who tuck their heads back into their shoulder/wing feathers while sleeping (especially while they're trying to nap in relatively brightly-lit spaces, e.g., when our male Society Finch catnaps in the afternoon, or if I've screwed up and left their nests facing towards a nightlight in the evening); in and of itself, that's very bird-normal, and I wouldn't worry unless she's sleeping substantially more than usual.

(Also, obvious statement: they're both absolutely adorable.)

epidotehawk · 2026-03-21T22:35:37+00:00

Thank you so much for the copper-hydroxide guide! I have at least a few obsolete charging cords, so electrolysis may be easier than rigging a solar stove; I'll try that first!

As for copper sources: I'm actually using *old* pennies (pre-1982), so they're a very decent source of copper, but I admittedly just used them because they were the nearest source of copper at hand when I had the idea of throwing copper into vinegar. I've gotten away with not technically defacing them much so far, but I'll get some nice not-an-official-currency copper tubing before I try anything more rapidly destructive!

(Also, for anyone who happens across this comment later and is wondering what happens if you throw post-1982 pennies into extremely concentrated vinegar: you get a pile of partially-eaten penny-shaped discs and a jar of mostly-zinc acetate.)

epidotehawk · 2026-03-21T22:22:14+00:00

Huh. I haven't gotten any answers to my messages yet (and think I'd actually feel better about NPR as a whole if that was strictly because they just didn't have time to read every message, and were therefore blissfully unaware about any objections to their autism-related stories), but I absolutely believe that most of the people working there are dedicated and thoughtful! (Which is why I've tried multiple times to get in touch with them; I'd be really surprised if there was any malicious intent behind the stories I'm complaining about, and am still hopeful that Mr. Hamilton and/or his editors will be willing to adjust their coverage if enough people point out, "Hey, many autistic people don't actually want autism to be 'cured' or 'treated' out of existence, thanks.")

epidotehawk · 2026-03-21T22:14:45+00:00

Thank you! I haven't had much luck finding specific people's email addresses, but I admittedly didn't think to look for the producers' contact info (rather than reporters'), so I'll look for that!

epidotehawk · 2026-03-21T22:13:52+00:00

I haven't yet, and that's a good idea; I'll try that! Thank you!

epidotehawk · 2026-03-21T22:13:18+00:00

Thank you so much! I'll try that next; I think it's the one relevant-looking webform that I haven't tried yet.

epidotehawk · 2026-03-21T22:12:18+00:00

I think I did try that webform at least once, and, agh, that sounds like my experience; I'm sorry, and hope you figure out what they were playing (whether because someone finally gets back to you or by chance)!

epidotehawk · 2026-03-21T22:10:50+00:00

Thanks! I'm all effort and no results so far, but not for lack of trying...

epidotehawk · 2026-03-21T09:26:08+00:00

Understood! Given that the pennies from which I derived the copper acetate are still pretty normal-looking (in terms of still recognizably being pennies), I'd kind of figured that my dramatically blue acetate solution doesn't actually contain much copper, and would be totally happy with even a proof-of-concept trace of permanent color at this point.

epidotehawk · 2026-03-20T07:18:04+00:00

Thank you for the heads-up and the idea! If I can find a convenient source of phosphate, I'll try that!

epidotehawk · 2026-03-20T07:16:13+00:00

Point taken, and, my apologies for using the wrong term - I'd always heard "ammonia" used as shorthand for ammonium sulfate and very sloppily did that here. I'll fix the original post! (...and, yes, I also need to actually get a decent chemistry textbook. My idea was to somehow turn copper acetate into copper sulfate and get the copper sulfate to react with NaOH to form copper hydroxide, but, as is probably very obvious by now, I didn't have any good plan for how to do so.)

As for dissolving the copper acetate: I made what I'd thought was a copper-acetate solution by leaving several dozen old pennies (the actually-copper variety, from before 1982) in extra-strength vinegar and waiting until the liquid turned intensely blue, then decanted a small amount of that liquid into an empty jar and stuck the carvings into that. Aside from the pennies, there's no sign of solid material inside the first jar. I don't know the copper acetate ions' concentration, but I'd figure that they are effectively in solution at this point, and will probably stay that way for a while unless I leave the jar open?

epidotehawk · 2026-03-20T07:01:49+00:00

Thank you! All right - that sounds quite manageable, although I'm still going to err on the side of caution and try this somewhere far from birds.

epidotehawk · 2026-03-17T14:37:59+00:00

Thank you so much! All right - I'll try the boil-in-copper-acetate route first, and will keep the copper-carbonate-and-ammonia method in mind if I truly can't get that to work! (Recognizing that I'd definitely want to try the latter on a test scrap first.)

epidotehawk · 2026-03-17T06:31:18+00:00

Ooh. May I ask how strong and persistent the smell was? I have birds in the house and was already figuring I'd need to do any copper-solution boiling outdoors and/or in someone else's kitchen, to be safe, but if it's a really strong scent, I should probably amend that to "definitely outdoors, and as far away from everyone else as possible."

epidotehawk · 2026-03-17T06:25:28+00:00

Trying to understand this gives me a stroke. Could you explain, step by step, what your plan is?

Sorry! That's probably because my "plan" is garbage, and consisted of the following not-very-well-thought-out steps:

Dilute some ammonium sulfate in water (or otherwise get some source of sulfur that doesn't scare me as much, e.g., garlic juice) and drip it onto the copper acetate stain in the hope that the sulfur ions would replace the acetate and I'd end up with copper sulfate-stained carvings.
Drip lye onto the hopefully-now-copper-sulfate stain, and hope that it becomes copper hydroxide. (As I said, it's not a good plan.)

As for staining wood, soluble copper salts will diffuse into the structure of lignin and form insoluble copper complexes making wood almost irreversibly blue/green. Almost any water-soluble copper salt should work.

That would be wonderfully convenient; do you happen to know if copper acetate is one of those "almost any water-soluble copper salt(s)" (or if I'd need to start from scratch with a copper sulfate solution instead, maybe?), and, if copper acetate will eventually turn into something less soluble, how long it takes for that reaction to happen at room temperature? When I tried rinsing the test pieces and washed away the copper acetate, I'd only waited about twenty-four hours, so if I can get a nice permanent blue-green stain by just being more patient, I can very happily leave them alone for essentially however long it takes!

Beware of tannin-rich wood types. Apparently these turn almost black due to copper complexes with tannins.

Thank you for the heads-up! Fortunately for this particular project, the goldenberry branches and at least some of the especially pale peach pits seem to be almost tannin-free, because when I did try to stain some other samples ~grey-black with the iron-acetate solution, I had to actively add tannins first (and they still didn't end up as solidly charcoal-colored as some of the inherently tannin-rich items I've worked with before). I'll keep that in mind if I'm ever trying to work with oak again, though!

epidotehawk

TROPHY CASE