goldboilermark posted:

i had no idea swans were so dangerous

simplefish posted:

JaucheCharly posted:

Those guys are firefighters. Are you surprised that it isn't shot by police with military grade gear?

Tusen Takk posted:

gently caress swans but at least they aren't as delicate as whatever type of bird that chinese guy was choking (it's a loon, I think)

waitwhatno posted:

they aren't, goons are just a bunch of pussies.

for comparison, here are some non-pussified "chinese" kids wrestling with a baby bear for fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvMv9tM-0UA

waitwhatno posted:

they aren't, goons are just a bunch of pussies.

for comparison, here are some non-pussified "chinese" kids wrestling with a baby bear for fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvMv9tM-0UA

waitwhatno posted:

they aren't, goons are just a bunch of pussies.

for comparison, here are some non-pussified "chinese" kids wrestling with a baby bear for fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvMv9tM-0UA

simplefish posted:

I lived in a town with a massive swan population and never got attacked. Then went to a university with a lake, and while some of the geese were belligerent bell ends, I never had issues with the swans.

How the hell is there this much swan hate?

simplefish posted:

I lived in a town with a massive swan population and never got attacked. Then went to a university with a lake, and while some of the geese were belligerent bell ends, I never had issues with the swans.

How the hell is there this much swan hate?

DetroitVectorSmooth posted:

birds are terrifying

DetroitVectorSmooth posted:

1997 in russia was hosed up dude lmfao

BattleCattle posted:

Swans terrify me because they are large relentless velociraptors that can fly.

Bhodi posted:

waitwhatnoyou'lldie

Xelkelvos posted:

Clearly those two are not Chinese as no Chinese person is afraid of an animal so long as they can consume it.

BattleCattle posted:

A male duck is known as a "drake". It's conceivable that what we perceive as a cute duck may be, to their eyes, a terrifying dragon.

syscall girl posted:

I read that when Marco Polo maybe went to China he was told there would be dragons but it turned out that they were just crocodiles or alligators.

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

Yeah but crocodiles/alligators are dinosaurs so awesome they didn't need to change. Birds are fuckin chumps compared to them.

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

Yeah but crocodiles/alligators are dinosaurs so awesome they didn't need to change. Birds are fuckin chumps compared to them.

simplefish posted:

I lived in a town with a massive swan population and never got attacked. Then went to a university with a lake, and while some of the geese were belligerent bell ends, I never had issues with the swans.

How the hell is there this much swan hate?

BattleCattle posted:

Swans terrify me because they are large relentless velociraptors that can fly.

Improbable Lobster posted:

Here's a picture from 1979

Sanctum posted:

Yeah but the bison population had an unnatural explosion due to the changes brought about by the colombian exchange. The natives did considerable landscaping and selective deforestation to create the mid-west plains which were originally unfenced croplands. Rather than build fences, they simply hunted and killed any bison that got near their crops. Before european western expansion they all died to diseases (much academic fervor about whether the death rate was 95-98% or extreme skeptics going as low as... 90%.) This caused the bison population to explode and the herds grew to such sizes that they prevented the natural growth of shrubbery into forests normal for the regions simply by indiscriminately eating everything like a swarm of 2 ton hairy locusts.

I've been reading a lot about the results of the columbian exchange in china as well, and that poo poo is fascinating. When potatoes and maize were introduced it led to a population boom followed by a more eloquently deliberate tragedy of the commons than that of englands grazing pastures. The rice farmers, living in regions such as this:



would rent out the unworkable mountainous area like that in the background to a new and growing lower farmer class. Sweet potatoes and more importantly, maize could be grown on the steep slopes. As more people moved in and cut down the trees to create crops, they caused mass runoffs and erosion which led to floods that destroyed the rice paddies. The thing is, income from rent wasn't taxed and the farmers that owned the mountain lands could make more from the rent than they lost from the floods it caused. And the rice farmers understood what they were doing was causing the floods. So in a very deliberate analogue to the tragedy of the commons, the rice farmers owning the mountain lands rented them out because they could profit from it even as all the other ricer farms around them suffered along with them through increasing crop-destroying floods.



"Some locals wholly understood the problem. When the urban scholar Mei Zengliang paid a nostalgic visit in 1823 to the mountain town in which he had spent his childhood, he asked his former neighbors about the shack people. No ecologist today would have much to add to their response.

On uncleared mountains [the villagers told him], the soil is firm and the rocks hold fast; grass and trees are thick, years of rotting leaves cover the ground to depths of as much as 2 to 3 cun [three to four inches]. Whenever it rains, the rainwater runs off the trees and onto the rotten leaves, then into the soil and rocks, before seeping through cracks in the rocks to form streams. This water flows slowly, and as it flows downward the soil does not go with it.… Today [shack people] strip the mountains with blades and axes, and loosen their soil with shovels and hoes, so that before even one rainfall has finished, the sand and rocks wash down with the water, quickly flowing into ravines.

Erosion from the heights drowned the rice paddies in the lower Yangzi valleys, further driving up the price of rice, which encouraged more maize production in the heights, which drowned more rice in the valleys.

As shack people moved into the mountains, floods became ever more frequent. In the Song dynasty (960–1279 A.D.), major floods occurred somewhere in the empire at an average clip of about three every two years. Some farmers, many of them Hakka, illegally moved into the hills during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), removing trees as they did. Predictably, the pace of deluges increased to almost two per year. The Qing (1644–1911) actively promoted moving peoples into mountain forests. As night follows day, the surge in migration led to a surge in deforestation; the flood rate more than tripled, to a little more than six major floods a year. Worse, the floods mostly targeted China’s agricultural centers. Poring through personal diaries, county gazetteers, provincial archives, and imperial disaster-relief records, the historian Li Xiangjun found that 16,384 floods had occurred during the Qing dynasty. The great majority were small. But 13,537 of them occurred in the rich farmlands in the lower Yangzi and Huang He. And the floods kept growing. Between 1841 and 1911, the Qing faced more than thirteen major floods a year—a Katrina every month, as one historian put it to me. “The government had constant disasters in the most populous parts of the realm,” he said. “The areas that were most important to feeding everyone. It was not good.”

BONGHITZ posted:

Cool it, bird nerds.

Sheep-Goats posted:

Stop talking about waterfowl, worst derail ever.

Sheep-Goats posted:

Stop talking about waterfowl, worst derail ever.

Hobohemian posted:

I bet Mao would have murdered all these loving bird nerd losers in the cultural revolution, so really was he that bad?