Sound On 🔊🐱

My cotton ball sprouted wings!

murderfloof rolled a 1 on that check, lol bat's definitely caught red-han-... red-chested? red-faced? red all over, really.

exceptionally creepy. terrifying. (great work!) ... TUC had zero flier antagonists. closest to such could be Ajax, I guess? but, like, that dude got zero characterization other than 'nobody likes him' and being Solovet's bond.

so,, why not have a floof-flier be a malevolent bitch? albeit not to the same scale as the other malevolent bitch that affected damn near everyone in the North American Eastern Seaboard region of the Underland with their machinations, and 'just' limited to those that she might encounter by roaming around.

Hoary bat but underland. Maybe hiding a body beneath her. hoaries sometimes kill and eat smaller bats irl. jus surreptiously extretching her wing to conceal a bloody hand, foot, or limb. expression of who, me?~

dunno name. Who was the Greek bloke with the carnivorous horses? Sisyphus? Typhon? Could be selffulfilling prophecy, girl got a rotten name, shunned for rotten name, succumbed to inner demons or malign thoughts because everybody expected the worst from her so why not?

Possibly unrepentant manipulator. Exploits lack of knowledge or innocent assumptions. Missing people? Oh drat the gnawers got them.

You always ask me to draw such depressing bats 😢

Disturbing image under the cut, you were warned

Krita always de-saturates stuff when I export it (yes I've seen that srgb post going around, no the fix suggested didn't work), so I have to manually re-add the saturation after export. I hope I got the caught in the act feigned innocence expression right. To make the bats as expressive as they are in the books I have to give them binocular vision, larger eyes, and usually brows and eyelashes. It kinda makes them look 30% dog 70% bat. I hope the fur patterns and colors still make the species recognizable.

@teagantheamazing Hope you don't mind, but I wanted to pull this reply out to talk about a little more in depth, because I think it is important that people understand this as we move forward.

Also, I am speaking as a private citizen here, not as an employee of the Forest Service.

In the United States, wildland fire response is handled at three basic levels: Federal, State, and Local.

Federally, it is further broken down into the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. (Some parks have their own fire crews as well, but that varies from park to park, and they're usually still technically Forest Service.) There's really not a ton of difference between the two aside from whose name is on your paycheck. Pay is the same across each, structure is the same across each, training is the same across each. Federal crews and resources are, generally, the main and biggest responders to wildfires because wildfires tend to happen primarily on federal lands.

At the state and local level things vary a lot from state to state. You can have things like the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control in Colorado and Cal Fire in California, and you can have local structure departments that also have wildland divisions and/or training. Some of the local departments will be volunteer. State and local responders also work closely with federal responders, but how much and for how long varies from fire to fire.

Then, on top of all of that, you have private/contract crews. They are what it says on the tin: private crews of firefighters. Some of these crews are great! Very professional, very skilled. Others are...ah...not.

Now, what I am concerned about specifically as we head into this new administration is what is going to happen at the federal level. As I mentioned in the original post, the Forest Service is already struggling. It has ALWAYS been struggling. Without giving you a whole huge history lesson, the Forest Service was founded in the early 1900s by Teddy Roosevelt to protect public lands and preserve them for future use. People threw a FIT about it, specifically people who wanted to basically strip mine the forests for every single available resource. Taft was elected after Roosevelt and basically started undoing everything his predecessor had done. The budget for the Forest Service was destroyed, protections were rolled back. The only reason the Forest Service survived was because in 1910 there was a MASSIVE fire. It was, at the time, unprecedented and the Forest Service was able to use it to lobby for better funding going forward. But the same cycle has repeated ever since. An administration that doesn't value conservation will come in, shred the budget, there will be deadly consequences that make the next administration pad the budget some, and then it will start again.

It's a lot like people who stop taking their medicine because they think they're cured since they feel better, but they only feel better because they were taking their medicine.

So what happens now? Well, it's already happening and it happened under Biden, and will only get worse under Trump. To keep it simple, there are two kinds of federal employment: seasonal, and year-round. Most of the federal Forest Service jobs are seasonal, because the work is seasonal. This includes firefighters, but it also includes things like park rangers and trail maintenance crews. From late spring to early fall there are tooooons of people working. Then, the rest of the year, its a skeleton crew of year-rounders doing mostly maintenance work, controlled burns, paperwork, stuff like that.

Now, with all of that said, here is where we stand at this specific moment: the decision has already been made that the Forest Service will not be hiring seasonal workers outside of firefighting next year. This means no seasonal park rangers, no seasonal maintenance people, none of that. This means next year parks are going to be a MESS. Bathrooms will not be cleaned regularly, campgrounds will not be maintained, trails will not be maintained, and a ton of other stuff. The year-rounder skeleton crew will be all we've got. And, crucially, there will be less professionals monitoring the woods looking for new fires. Rangers, even ones not working directly on fire stuff, are a crucial level of protection for spotting and reporting fires.

Secondary to that is the pay issue. Even if you're a year-rounder, the pay is abysmal. Your average out the gate, newbie wildland firefighter is going to make around $17/hr base pay if they work for a federal agency. Now, there's a ton of random stuff that can bump that pay up even without the retention bonus we're currently getting. You get a night differential and a Sunday differential for starters, and hazard pay when you are actively working a fire, plus there's ALWAYS overtime, sometimes an insane amount of it. Then there's per diem if you are traveling for a fire, and that can be a nice little bump too. But the point/problem is that the pay is VERY unpredictable. You can have a massively busy season and be swimming in money, or you can have a slow as fuck season and end up scrapping by because the base pay isn't enough. The Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act is supposed to fix this by bumping up the base pay, but that can has been kicked back and forth in the government for yeeeears now.

Now, as you mentioned, people CAN transfer their federal qualifications for fire to state and private crews. It generally pays better if you do. But we do not want to privatize fire response. Given the size of this country, given the spread of the population within it, we have to have a federal firefighting force. Leaving it to the states and private companies will not be enough.

That is where we are starting the new administration: abysmal pay, failing departments, and slimmed back hiring. Given Trump's repeated insistence on slimming down the government, on withholding aid in blue states, on getting rid of things like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which is also crucial for firefighting), and other things in that vein, I think we are staring down the barrel of a very, very dangerous time.

So, some action items if you want to help:

Call your local representatives and insist they pass the Wildland Firefighter Protection Act NOW, before the new administration comes in. The new administration could still screw it up, but we've gotta at least try.

Be patient and understanding with Park Rangers in the coming years. They are doing their best with what they've got.

Take responsibility for your use of public lands. Clean up after yourself, pick up litter when you see it, and donate if there is a way for you to do so.

Educate yourself and your community on wildland fire even if you don't think you are in a wildland fire prone area. Learn about and implement defensible space around your homes and communities. I'll be doing a lot of education around this going forward, so if you have questions or want help please ask me!

From jellybean to (frosted) cinnamon bread loaf...

Juvenile Eastern Red Bat, via

Fluffy Animals ૮꒰ ˶• ༝ •˶꒱ა ♡

this is so fucking funny

Never try to defeat the Void 🐈‍⬛😉

Bat Profile: Spectral Bat

Vampyrum spectrum

Source & Photo credit: Jennifer Barros

RANGE: Central & South America

CONSERVATION STATUS: Near-Threatened

HABITAT & DIET: Like so many bats, we still have a lot to learn about this species. But we do know a few things about their diet and roosts. First, they are carnivores. This species is particularly large (see below) and thus they will eat birds are large as doves and cuckoos, as well as rodents and other bat species. They have even been observed eating bats right out of researcher's nets!

They live in smaller groups that are most often found in hollow trees. One of their unique traits is that they appear to form monogamous pairs, which is very unusual for bats.

Fun Fact: With a wingspan of about 1 meter, the spectral bat is the largest bat species in the western hemisphere and also the largest carnivorous bat in the WORLD!

that's a potato with wings and nobody can convince me otherwise

Peep the stats