Great-tail Grackles are very common in the Roswell area.  The inhabit our neighborhoods and parks.  I took all of these photos in Cahoun Park that is across the street from my house.  Grackles are often mistaken for crows or blackbirds but they really belong to the family of Meadow Larks.  They make good pets and can mimic simple words if kept in captivity long enough.

1 - Male Great-tail Grackle.

2 - Female Great-tail Grackle

3 - Great-tail Grackle in flight

4 - Great-tail Grackles like water

5 - And they perch in trees

6- Every species has it's moderators.  This is a Grackle moderator.

Noel

Well....

I don't know if they are great tails... I guess its a matter of opinion.

I would rate them as okay-tails, or maybe or maybe so-so tails as compared to say, Demi Rose.... 😇

(Mod, incoming) 😁

 

why would anyone want one for a pet?!  the ones in Dallas often sound like police radio interference amplified through a megaphone!  They're worse than peacocks and nowhere near as pretty.

Boy howdy! That "Moderator" looks really pissed off!!!

8 hours ago, n4gix said:

Boy howdy! That "Moderator" looks really pissed off!!!

Almost as PO'd as this 'jungle moderator'.  I took his picture at the Columbia SC zoo.

Noel

Yikes! Now that is downright scary! 

I haven't known it before!!

On 2/20/2021 at 4:13 PM, birdguy said:

Great-tail Grackles are very common in the Roswell area. 

 

And UFO's flown by incompetent alien pilots apparently.  Who despite having the technology to travel here from other dimensions, through time, or thousands of lightyears across the void... crash when they get to our pesky atmosphere. 😧

13 minutes ago, martin-w said:

 

And UFO's flown by incompetent alien pilots apparently.  Who despite having the technology to travel here from other dimensions, through time, or thousands of lightyears across the void... crash when they get to our pesky atmosphere. 😧

I seem to remember a sci-fi story from years ago, where some hostile aliens in a "massive" interstellar dreadnaught armed to the teeth had a horrible time getting through earths atmosphere....

Turns out that compared to humans, the terrifying ship-O-war was about the size of a basketball....

1 hour ago, HiFlyer said:

I seem to remember a sci-fi story from years ago, where some hostile aliens in a "massive" interstellar dreadnaught armed to the teeth had a horrible time getting through earths atmosphere....

Turns out that compared to humans, the terrifying ship-O-war was about the size of a basketball....

 

😁 There was an advert for a product on UK TV a while ago like that. The fearsome aliens were miniscule.

It reminds me of the US TV series Land of The Giants if you remember it. Loved it as a kid.

On the subject of Roswell, so called crashed alien ship, Project Mogul for sure in my opinion. No aliens to be seen. But of course, spreading the myth makes a truck load of money for the so called "UFO researchers".

Shame, it muddies the waters, when there is actually a mysterious phenomenon there to be investigated. 

Edited February 24, 20215 yr by martin-w

Martin, I can assure you the Roswell incident was real.  A lot of stuff wasn't mentioned.  The aliens with the bulbous heads and large eyes were just the androids who make up the flight crew.  The real aliens survived the crash snuck into Roswell and mixed with the population.  Their children grew up and moved into adjoining communities like Hobbs, Artesia and Ruidoso.  And they now sit on the city councils of Roswell and those neighboring communities.

They can be identified by their feet.  They have six toes on each foot.  Of course they wear shoes in public so only those of us who have become friends with them know who they are.

They are now in almost every community in the world since most of the UFO's don't crash on landing they are able to sneak in and mix with the populations.  They were in the forefront of the efforts to fight global warming.

One of them told me that the reason they came to Earth was to help us out.  They recognized where the industrial revolution was going and thought they could convince us to change our ways.  But we were too busy waging wars and making money to pay attention to them so they failed in their mission. So now a few at a time are leaving and going back to their home planet.

They wish us luck.

Noel

 

 

Edited February 24, 20215 yr by birdguy

Noel: Brilliant! 

On 2/24/2021 at 1:10 PM, HiFlyer said:

...Turns out that compared to humans, the terrifying ship-O-war was about the size of a basketball....

From the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:

Quote

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.
For instance, a human (see Earth) named Arthur Dent who, because of a Vogon Constructor Fleet, was one of the last two humans in the Universe at the time, once said "I seem to be having trmendous difficulty with my lifestyle." At the very moment that Arthur said this, a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'Hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'Hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

"It's just life," they say.

 

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51193

I'm too dumb to understand the description of where the tiny aliens landed.. please can someone explain?  Thanks.

2 hours ago, HighBypass said:

I'm too dumb to understand the description of where the tiny aliens landed.. please can someone explain?  Thanks.

The aliens turned out to be microscopic, and they're out there on the ground. Somewhere on the landing field in a puddle of water, or maybe even a drop of water. The monsters they say they see all around them are probably paramecium.

Hopefully it's not that bad, and what they're seeing are ants. If it really is paramecium, it'll be almost impossible to find them.