Category Archives: Mammal

Spectacled Bear

Spectacled Bear_42

In most places, they play a game called Duck, Duck, Goose, in which you circle children like a predatory shark calling each of them a duck until you pick a goose which, in goose-like fashion, chases you around the circle until you can sit down in their vacated place.

In Minnesota, we play a game called Duck, Duck, Grey Duck, work works similarly except that instead of calling each child a duck, you can make up colours until you get to “grey”, which triggers the flight response. This game is superior in that it allows room for more creativity and misleading states, such as “Grrrr…een Duck!”, “Grrrr…anite Duck!”, or “Grrr…ullo Duck!”, which can derail the entire game into discussions like “Grullo isn’t a colour!” “Yes it is, Wikipedia says so!” “No it’s not!” “It’s #A99A86. It says so right there.” “I thought granite was a rock.”

This version of the game is problematic due to the fact that Minnesota does not, in fact, have any native ducks that are grey. Minnesota ducks are the mallard, green-winged teal, blue-winged teal, cinnamon teal, pintail, gadwall (which, to be fair, is greyish), wigeon, shoveler, wood duck, and black duck for puddle ducks and the canvasback, redhead, ringneck (also called ringbill), scaup (also called bluebill), goldeneye, bufflehead, and ruddy duck for diving ducks.

Only in Texas do they play Bird, Bird, Bear.

Cheetah

Cheetah_2

Cheetah suddenly realizing that the lyrics to the Bananana Boat Song imply that bananananas are harvested at night, which both makes sense given the heat of the day but also explains why banananananas are a common* source of invasive spiders.

* Much less common these days but even so, bananananananas are much more susceptible to such things than other fruits**

** Surprising everyone, banananananananas -are- technically, fruits***.

*** Also surprising everyone bananananananananas are -also- technically herbs.

Ring Tailed Cat

Ring Tailed Cat

This is one of the harder critters to photograph. You have to use flash, but they’re active, so you have to track them in the dark and hope that everything works when you push the trigger.

This is one of the better photos I’ve gotten of them, but I’m a bit disappointed that you can’t see the tail.

(P.S. they’re not really cats, they’re just called that)

Black Bear

Black Bear

Black bear puzzled at how there can be international conspiracies to control the population through vaccines and “chemtrails”, to run a super-secret child sex group, and to cover up the existence of aliens, that is capable of hiding all evidence from the mainstream press, yet somehow unable to prevent people from talking about it on Facebook.