Live Barn Owl Nest Cam

The most exciting thing on the internet right now. Even when she is asleep and sitting on her babies.

via india

So, humans make horror films and think they're really scary

Well, have a look at this.



via Radiolab.

Loving earwigs

Gosh, this blog has been full of dead old guys lately, I've just noticed. Phew. Here, read this article about the sensual, passionate, feminine natures of earwigs instead.

Wild mothers

In yet another example of how callous mothers often are in the wild, a koala mother has flung one of her newly born twin babies out of her pouch, to be delightedly hand raised by a human in a Crocodile Dundee hat who has thought fully provided a koala soft toy for it to climb on, instead of a pouch. We are so judgmental about our own species' examples of indifferent mothering, when cute furry creatures seem to abandon or eat their own young as a matter of course.

The Unfit Koala Mother was last seen climbing a tree, serenely, with the remaining twin secure in her pouch. There are thus far no indications that other koalas are going to prosecute. A nursing mother koala at a nearby zoo was asked for her opinion, and she just shrugged.

So here is the moment you've been waiting for: video of the koala baby getting bottle fed, with a feast of other wildlife video snippets on the page.

Oh the jetlag

Ok I got up early today but I am absolutely fecked. I'm hoping an early night tonight can do it.

The guy in the middle was a depressed fish in the window of a restaurant on 5th ave around the corner from us, who just stayed in this position the whole time I stood there gazing at him. It is like he knows.

I never saw him again after this.

The Toads

Instructions for an adventure

I found this on the road into the village a week or so ago, scrunched up. I de-scrunched it, and saw that it was, in fact, a series of very specific directions:

Go over new bypass heading towards the Lahinch Road
Come to roundabout on Lahinch Road
Take 1st left on roundabout
Head toward Ennis
Go 200 yards, see stone wall
Take 1st left after stone wall
And you are there.

On the word 'there' was sitting a small slug. I took this as a friendly sign. I have not yet taken the adventure. I am on another adventure, tomorrow, in another direction altogether. Please feel free to follow the directions. It does not say where to start. Best off starting where you are.

Good luck.

They do this only to get what they want

This is what we're up against. Try arguing with that.

How do they hold up? How do they survive?

Baby pandas milk it. Except for the general tone of playful friendliness, these guys remind me of Cartman.

So you think nature is fragile and cannot possibly withstand human whim?

I just noticed yesterday that there are some weeds here that have pushed their way right through the tarmacadam here. The weeds are poking right through it.

Whoever thinks that human activity will indeed blight the earth's surface irretrievably, has obviously never ever met a weed like the one growing through the tarmacadam in front of this house right now.

Octopus grass

More from the Bill and Lara story

These are again, from their first meeting. The original pic being this, of course, and click on it to see it larger. We need to talk about our feelings about these photographs, folks. Please feel free to share in the comments. I can't stop looking at the photo of these two holding each other. The sheer unmitigated joy. I am so happy they have found each other.

Meet the mandrill family.

16-year-old male mandrill "Pablo", 10-year-old "Zora" and their four-week-old baby play in their enclosure on March 20, 2009 at Munich's zoo Tierpark Hellabrunn.

Click on the picture to make it bigger.

Bill and Lara meet for the first time. Lara has been lonely.

Polar bears Bill, right, and Lara react during their first meeting, at the Zoom Erlebniswelt zoo, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, Friday, April 17, 2009. Bill came from the zoo in Bruenn, Czech Republic, as a new partner for Lara.

Click on the picture to make it bigger. You can find these and more photographs of zoo animals in springtime over at the wonderful Big Picture.

Pagi and Palu, the sun bears

Pagi, right, a female Bornean sun bear cub whose name means "morning" in a Malayan dialect, licks her brother, Palu, who is named after a valley in Borneo, as they made their public debut at the San Diego Zoo on Monday, March 16, 2009. The twins are only the third Bornean sun bear litter to be born in North America, all of which have occurred at the San Diego Zoo, where researchers are studying reproductive biology and maternal care of the sun bear.

Click on the picture to make it bigger.

Fancy a tabby bengal?

Hep cats, of the four distinct types of Bengal tiger existent in the world. What a photo shoot.

Stoatdancing

This is being framed in a "When Good Stoats Go Bad" kind of way, but to me it looks like a slinky creature having fun in the snow. Pity I can't embed it, BBC also uploaded it to youtube but disabled embedding, even though they put their logo all over the video.

Apparently the chica can go like this for 15 minutes at a time.

I saw a fox behaving in like manner on Tuesday night in Camden town, London, on Mornington Street, by the bridge. She ducked into a garden when she felt herself being looked at. The second fox I saw in London. The first was on Monday night, sniffing around for food and exploring the snow, in the garden of the house I was staying in, also in Camden.

Um, did you get the Simple Minds reference in the title? Now look again.

The mouse who came in from the cold

We had a visit from a small mouse last night. I woke up several times, listening to him poke about in the house, wondering what he was doing, thinking of the piece of baklava I had bought from that lovely lovely Egyptian man who runs the falafel shop on Clark street. This morning I discovered my bag had been unlocked, opened, and there was an explosion of half-eaten baklava (that still looked deeply yummy) all over the bottom of it.

There were small mouse claw marks on my brown leather wallet. He had clearly used it as a perch from which to enjoy his baklava. It was a cold night last night. We had had some hot whiskeys, and I there was a little left in the bottom of one of the glasses on the counter, about half of that left this morning.

That mouse had a good time.

Insects Live Furiously

Today I am inspired by insects. It doesn't take much. But I am going to London soon and this is one place I think I will have to visit while I am there (except that it doesn't open until early next year... groo). One house. 17 million insects. Right in the middle of the city. This is very very exciting. This is the kind of thing that would make a gal move to London. Just to be close to them. Just to visit them every day. Just to be near humans who say things like, "The point is that I have a huge amount of admiration for these kinds of flies." The scientist in question is talking about maggots that go to live in human corpses that he then collects and investigates.

This article is so full of people who are passionate about insects. It makes me long for the tribe. There is a place there called the Insect Information Service and it is staffed by a man who is the " 'go to' man for the whole world's bugs." Hurrah! Here is what he says: "There are 23,500 insects and spiders in Britain and no one knows all of them, but I know most... My single mission in life is to make people more aware of the life around them. It mystifies me that people are interested in what's on Mars when all of this stuff is at their feet to be handled and touched." Swoon.

And there is a female mite specialist, who is married to the Curator of Cockroaches. This needs to be made into a movie.

So it is a long article. This is the anecdotal visceral emotional core of it:

"Hall is the country's leading forensic scientist, his speciality being the study of maggots in flesh wounds to discover the precise time of a murder.

He is a wry and engaging figure, a man who should be a TV drama series. He greets me with a selection of fattened maggots in pots, a kind of juju necklace of maggots removed from the rear end of a sheep, and a series of graphic photographs of wounds (mostly in live animals) in which maggots are making hay. In among the photographs are a couple of pictures of his own legs and arms with livid sores.

'I had a personal experience of some of this after I came back from Bolivia one time,' he explains matter of factly, 'along with the maggot of a botfly in my leg. They can eventually get quite large,' - he opens a 2in gap between thumb and forefinger - 'so I could feel this movement and I could see the tip of the maggot coming up to breathe and going back down.'

What did he do?

'Well you can't really squeeze them out, because they have these backward facing spines. You need surgery. I had a couple in my arm, too. I discovered if you put Vaseline over them they can't breathe and tend to back out of their own accord, eventually.' "

Ok, I've just realised that the insects will actually be dead, not living, and so, the whole heartbeatingly exciting spectacle of Lucy wandering blissfully through an eight storey cocoon of fucking and fighting insects has vanished in the space of a paragraph. London can breathe its smoggy air safely again. But I like this bit a lot:

"In the heart of the new building the Natural History Museum will also be putting its greatest living wonders on show: its staff of 220 scientists will be presented in full view of the public.

At intervals, along the winding descent through the dramatic cocoon, these rare creatures will be viewed behind glass at their work stations, preparing petri-dishes, peering through microscopes, eating lunch, perhaps grabbing an afternoon nap. At various points the public will have the opportunity to interact directly with them, to ask questions and to examine experiments."

The bear and the small squiggle

If you haven't seen this yet, and you're feeling even slightly poorly, then you need to have a look at this and all will be well.

You can kind of imagine what she's feeling, even if you are wildly far out in your impressions. It is an evocative scene. The gal was artificially inseminated, so she's probably a bit surprised by the sudden appearance of this squiggle creature. She looks a bit surprised, a bit like, oh for goodness sake, look at this squiggly little maggot, it has just appeared out of nowhere and it really is hopeless. I'd better take it in and sort it out before it squiggles itself out of existence.